Fallow
by Aleycat4eva
Summary: /falō/ Adjective. A once plowed and harrowed field left unsown for a period in order to restore its fertility as part of a crop rotation or to avoid surplus production. A returning of cultivation to a more basic state.
1. Thirty Days

Thirty days.

Statistically speaking, after a natural disaster or a state of emergency, that's when the most destruction occurs. That first month is when the death toll is the highest, the violence the heaviest, and when instability sets in.

When infrastructure shuts down it takes a short amount of time for this to start being apparent. It only takes a few short hours for people to start getting antsy and nervous, becoming more volatile the higher concentration they are in. Those people unsettle others, upset the equilibrium, and then everyone starts pairing off. Some step up to try and corral this, but leadership is up for grabs and most likely it is given to default positions. Where it once went to the national government, it then goes to the local administrations, then to the community leaders, down to the family heads, and finally the individual. Of course, that's a bit of a generalization considering social nuances and minutia along the way. It's made with the assumption that religious institutions are not heavily in play, and that military installments or militias are not around.

Generally speaking, though, that distribution of control and leadership is already up for grabs within hours, maybe days. Even in a stable government system the balance is alway shifting. An emergency is just a catalyst that exacerbates a naturally occurring phenomenon. It's like oxidation; occurring all the time everywhere to everything, but when it happens very quickly, it's called a fucking fire.

After that, with new and unsteady guidance, the securing of necessary resources becomes one of the main focuses, assuming no immediate threats of life. Food, water, and shelter are the big three; they become prioritized. In some countries, this is not so different than everyday life. In others, where such goods are distributed by means of supermarkets and city utilities, this is where things quickly go to shit. Assuming power goes out and for some reason water is not running, even the most civilized person can become hyperagressive as they scramble for them. Hoards are built, groups emerge, hostilities escalate. Cautious people will have filled everything available with water, begin taking inventory, and rationing. Paranoid ones will start defensive or offensive measures in order to keep stocks safe.

Clashes happen.

During this same times period, as things escalate, many will abandon heavily populated areas. An exodus begins, a great migration outward in hopes of more safety. Things get left behind, material goods and items of sentimental value are put aside. Ties are severed with family pets and even those considered burdensome to the group, taking up valuable resources. After the big three have been secured grabs begin for medical supplies and weapons, ways to maintain strength and numbers. Looting sets in quickly, sometimes before power becomes stabilized. People grab what they anticipate they will need, what they crave, what they can.

Uncertainty becomes commonplace. Nobody knows when structure will arrive again, and they sink into survival. The greatest acts of human kindness can take place in this mindset, and some of the greatest atrocities.

A great, great number of people will brag about their ability to survive such hypothetical situation. They will talk about what they will grab, what they will do to maintain loved ones and get through the event. They will boast of theoretical knowledge in things they have never practiced, skills they _could_ have, and plans they _will_ make. Some will say they yearn for the moment, that they are eager for society to fall.

The smart ones realize that it will not be a grandiose dive into glory and grit.

They will recognize that a sinking society means that little luxuries go to the wayside, that no society means no maintenance, roving gangs, limited access to hygiene and medical care. They will recognize that things that were negligible before become deadly, that shitting to death is a feasible way to go after the fall. They will know that cream filled donuts will be memories of the past, placed in nostalgia alongside basic manners and comfortable beds. These people will acknowledge that mandatory manual labor is hard, that there is a reason they had others kill their food for them and build their homes. They will realize that the stench of a person who has bathed in nothing but streams after nine days of activity and no deodorant is _offensive_ and _deplorable_.

Here's what she was taught;

If you are a woman of any kind, it must sorrily be stated that you are at a higher rate of victimization during these times. If you have friends, gather them, but only if you trust them surely and fully. If you do not, take this time to make a face in the mirror and realize maybe you should have been a little more social. Then rationalize it away because maybe you don't have a group, but that means you are responsible for only yourself.

If you have long hair and cannot bear to cut it, cut it anyway. Barring that, welcome to buns. Braids can be pulled in an altercation, and therefore if you choose such, be aware. Hats and bandanas are also a consideration.

( _Her mother's hands are gnarled, several shades darker than her own, and missing a few fingers. But they are steady as they present the red checkered scarf to her daughter. Even at six years old she knows to handle it with care. Now, she wraps it around her head thinking shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves doesn't always take three generations_.)

Get yourself a new wardrobe. In hot, wet places with lots of sun, that means light fabric and full cover. In cold, dry places that means bundle and stay dry, because sweat freezes. If you suspect altercations and conflict to be unavoidable, armor up. Leather is favored by bikers for a reason. In's not a great armor, won't stop guns or direct knives, but indirect strikes and scrapes are guarded against. This goes for most motorcycle clothing as well, but if that offends, silks can be layered to similar effect, and heavy denim as well. Just remember that you should be able to move, and all weight adds up after hours spent on foot.

As with any good outfit, pick shoes that match. New boots will take time to break in, cause blisters and aches, but when needs must. Running shoes also work. Regretfully, sandals are out alongside those beautiful heels.

Accessorize a little. Maybe the power has gone out and everything has gone to shit, but there's a cute 550 cord bracelet that matches that jacket, and a good hinge knife with a clip that really accents those cargo pants. Those hair ties and bobby pins are useful for more than just your mane.

Now make a choice- stay or leave. Weigh the options of both. Generalizations can be made, but ultimately the choice is yours.

( _Or the groups, but mistakes were made and regrets arise. She should have socialized more. Her fault. Her dad always said she needed to make more friends, but it was never easy for her like it was for him. She remembers him down at the VA chatting people up as they waited. Remembers wondering things like how and why._ )

If you stay, fortify. The furniture is lovely, and that coffee table fits perfect over the bay windows. If you ration remember the rule: first in, first out. Food spoils, eat what perishes quickly first. You are now on the world's hardest diet, count those calories, and remember to account for activity levels. Water stagnates and sours, but a tincture of iodine can help -five drops per quart with clear, ten for cloudy.

Hold as long as you can.

Unfortunately, resources get used.

If you choose to go, or when you are forced out, choose your destination.

( _She tries to justify her choices with logic. Civilizations have always arisen by water sources because resources are more plentiful there. But it isn't reason she hears in her ears, nor teachers reciting history lessons. It is her mother's voice as she spoke on the crumbling porch, cigarette smoke drifting from her mouth as she looked into the wild without really seeing it._

 _"People fled to the mountains and rivers. For me it was water. The Mekong became the Bassac. The Bassac flowed out into the sea. The sea carried me farther than they could reach."_

 _The Mississippi runs by the tip of Illinois, and from there it's a straight shot to the coast. Water carried her mother to better lands, maybe it will do the same for her. If not, she will turn east to the nearest mountains._ )

Get a map and a compass. Know to how use them. Be aware of your surroundings. Get those bags, fill them with what you have left while keeping weight and space in mind. Arm yourself, whether it be with a chair leg you broke off or a coconut knife. Anything you can wield. Ask yourself if you can really use them if need be. Do not play games. Do not kid yourself, pretending to carry a fortitude you do not actually have. Ask yourself again and again.

Feel the trepidation in your heart, nausea in your stomach, and the overwhelming dread. Acknowledge them. Accept them. Work through them until you are calm again.

( _The answer to her question is yes. She makes sure it is._ )

Open your door anyway. Take a step. Then another.

Keep going.

Get away from heavy populations. Stay quiet, keep your head down, and again, avoid groups.

( _"They gathered them up for evil things," her mother said. "For the labor camps. For the Killing Fields."_

 _Maybe the groups aren't Pol Pot's soldiers, but she doesn't join any regardless. Too many memories of the solemnly recounted tales where people were gathered for mass graves and torture. For abuses beyond imagine._ )

Move. Keep moving until you reach the city limits. On foot, on a bike- on anything that is quiet, or quick enough that sound does not matter. Keep going until the urban environment bleeds into wild, until you can no longer see cement, pavement, or asphalt.

Food and water will run out quicker than you expect, even when you ration. There are ways to gather these, but when you are on the move it is inadvisable to set snares, and hunting game is often trickier than most give credit for. In the first thirty days, try to gather dried goods. Sugars and protein are the rarest things in nature. Stock up on them. Salt too, if you live in a place where the environment may not provide it readily.

Count the days.

( _She spent ten holed up, three traveling as far and fast as she could. She only stopped to scavenge through a heavily looted gas station in the boonies, where she tucked fishing line and hooks into her bag, nabbed herself a mean looking machete from a fly-blown dead man, a nylon hammock in a pouch, a jar of peanut butter, a bag of hard candy, and water bottle from the staff room. She's so tired, but she has to keep going. Has to keep walking. Her checkered scarf sticks to her grimy skin, and she chews gum to keep the thirst at bay. A dog started following her at some point, some Koolie mutt with wary amber eyes and pointed ears._

 _She graces it with some peanut butter and does not scare it away. It is quiet enough, and if she runs out of food it makes a convenient protein source_.)

Take shelter or make it. Either way, make sure you can move fast if you have to. If safety is uncertain, sleep with your shoes on. If you are scared someone might find you on the ground, create a hidey-hole and make escape plans before you rest. Keep your bag close, and your weapons closer. Learn to sleep at the drop of a hat and wake up in half a heart beat.

( _There's little instructions on the hammock that tell her not to hang it high up. She does anyway, stretched between the tree boughs twenty feet off the ground, her pack acting as a pillow as the hammock cocoons around her. It feels like a coffin, hot and stuffy beyond reason. She sweats like a pig inside of it. Her skin itches where chiggers have burrowed in, and she has picked god knows how many ticks from her body. It does not help that she hasn't shaved in ten days, though her stink has lessened a bit since she scrubbed in an ice-cold creek. She still smells, but lightly, and of musky algae instead of caked on grime and BO._

 _She wonders if all the discomfort is worth it until_ one night _footsteps pass beneath her, accompanied by groaning and gnashing teeth. She's still awake hours later when distant screams echo through the trees, just audible above the sounds of cicadas and crickets._

 _She does not question again._

 _It has only been seventeen days since the power cut off._ )

If one happens to be the owner of a particular set of sexual organs, a time may come during these first thirty days when old aunt flow comes to visit. It will be doubly annoying, doubly inconvenient, and near disgusting without regular bathing and a constant travel. No matter what, remember your calorie counts, drink plenty, and if you so happen to have the chance, raid for supplies. Even if it takes up precious space, stock up. Tampons are individually packaged and are great for packing wounds, crude water filters, cordage- the list goes on. Be on the look-out for basic fever and pain reducers, which may have already been hoarded.

If you are lucky, other things may not have been.

( _The bait shop in the woods surprises her, propped up beside an old dirt road. She watches it for a full day, camped out in the cluster of vines and_ thornbushes _adjacent to it. The flies and mosquitoes try to eat her alive, and her cramps ache so bad she feels them in her back. The dog -Meatsack, as she's taken to calling it- wanders around the outside of the store curiously before it disappears again. She wonders how it has survived because she knows damn well she hasn't been feeding it enough._

 _At the end of her watch, no one has come or gone. She chances it, slipping towards the run down building on quiet, savagely aching feet. Her head spins from the activity, her stomach strangely hollow and hurting._

 _There is nothing living inside that place. However, the dead that stinks of sepsis and rot, rises to greet her._

 _Her stolen machete is sharp, and her swing sure. It is still jarring to feel the give of bone beneath her blade, panic giving her the strength to sink it deep into the once-teens skull. The body ragdolls on her and murky fluid_ washes _over her as she breathes heavily through her nose. The stench is incredible, fetid and musky, like roadkill in the hot summer sun only a thousand times worse and spilling on her. She sees a writhing nest of maggots in the soft flesh of its cheek, and the sour stench is all prevailing._

 _She vomits on herself and the twice-dead corpse on top of her._

 _The bait shop turns out to be worth bile stained clothes and trauma, an establishment built for some sort of campsite nearby. There are tampons, yes, and more on the shelf of sundries. Multivitamins, plastic packets of aspirin, tiny bottles of soaps for camping, a toothbrush and tiny toothpaste. There's so much. She never realized before now that she could live for weeks out of the supplies here._

 _She weeps when she discovers the shop is on a_ well _system, and that the bathroom sink still works._

 _It takes three days for her to work herself up enough to leave, freshly washed in the bathroom sink and shaven for the first time in what feels like forever, her clothes stiff from air drying but scrubbed clean. The backpack that once hung on the wall now sits on her shoulders, capable of holding more and better suited for this than her old bookbag. She feels better than she can remember since this began, and far, far more prepared._

 _Meatsack joins her after a full day of travel, its merle coat stained red in places. It has multiplied, joined by two other canines. She does not know how, or why. She does not think this is natural dog behavior._

 _Still, they do not bother her and she returns that respect, going so far as to feed them occasional scraps when she feels so inclined. They are a strange cattle, sometimes there and sometimes not._

 _It has been twenty-one days._ )

At this point, if you have a group, you may have run into struggles in power dynamics already. There are many unspoken rules and tactics to use in this area. Always bear in mind that you are trying to keep yourself safe, to keep yourself alive. Know what you are willing to go through for that, what you may give to keep it. Know your lines. Do not accept them being crossed.

If you are alone, remember this: the effects of isolation are pronounced and very real. It is not just a psychological response either. It is a physiological reaction. If you are on your own too long the body becomes flooded with stress hormones, immune response goes down, and for some reason increased inflammation occurs. This is a proven fact. No matter how strong one thinks their mind is, no matter how much they enjoy voluntary solitude, even a few weeks of isolation take their toll.

( _She catches herself mouthing inventory to herself, sometimes. Worse, she catches herself beginning to make soft noises. It's a thoughtless action, a strange thing she doesn't realize she's doing until it's already been done. Mimicry, mostly. Echoing sounds of the forest around her, trying to match tone and pitch just right. It is a game that keeps her mind occupied in the hours and hours of nothingness. How can she contort her lips, throat, and tongue to match_ a songbirds _cry or the sharp bark of a dog?_

 _Meatsack and the meat-pack watch her, sometimes responding with occasional vocalizations of their own._

 _She tries to be careful because she knows this is a slippery slope._

 _It has been twenty-three days_.)

As the days add up, remember to be aware. If a solid structure shows no signs of cropping back up, if the urban areas and small towns you come across are still lawless and bereft, hold on to their memory. All is not lost. Humans are an incredible species. Forever they have gone through cycles of utter desolation a booming creation. It is not a new thing.

You will make mistakes.

( _The Mississippi is wide, strong, and clogged so full of shit that it amazes her. The lowlands are chock full of debris and the dead, and she should have probably thought harder about the sheer population distribution along the edge of the mighty river._

 _She slinks from river town to river town and they are in terrible, terrible shape. She flits around the borders of them, a sullen watcher brooding on her oversight._

 _She finds one city that looks promising, though, and sets up a watch on day twenty-six._ )

There will be obstacles.

( _With sweat beading on her gritty, dirty skin, she hears sharp cracks of gunfire after just a few hours of waiting. It knocks her from her thoughts, and below her Meatsack jerks like_ its _been struck. The roar of an engine hums through the air, and she hasn't heard one in so long the sound legitimately startles her._

 _Meatsack looks to her hiding place in the high branches of a tree and whines piteously. She spares it a single glance, meeting each of those dogs eyes as the noises slowly get louder._

 _When the first voices can be heard shouting over the increasingly loud short bursts of fire and the engines, the pack scatters._

 _The noises_ draws _attention far worse than her own, and corpses gather from the woods she has been hiding in. The dead pass beneath her like a slow moving, infinitely unpleasant smelling herd_.)

It will be hard, almost unbearable at times.

( _She sees people at one point. Real live people, with haggard faces and guns in their hands. Her heart leaps into her throat at their appearance, and she is almost overwhelmed by the sudden urge to scream and get their attention as they fight their way through the dead. She yearns to hear_ actual _human speech, to socialize with something other than dogs._

 _She swallows it down. She makes herself wait, makes herself watch._

 _The group is strong. They survive their battle and make camp at the outskirts of town as the sun sets._

 _They are not good. Evil things happen at that camp. Simply bearing witness breaks her a little._

 _She climbs up that tree scared and hungry for company. Two days later, she climbs down and knows three things. She is a coward for not helping, she is turning toward the east, and she is doing so alone._

 _Twenty-eight days in and she has ingrained the faces of strangers burned into her mind._ )

Survive. Fill your needs, learn new skills, plan ahead, and stay safe. Cherish what you can.

( _Meatsack tracks her down again, somehow. She should be worried about this skill it has, and the new dog it has brought._

 _Instead, she sinks her hands into_ Meatsack's _fur and welcomes the new member to her abandoned domestic animal herd as the sun rises on day twenty-nine._ )

You can make it. You can do this. Don't lose moral.

( _"Survival is hard, Maly Smith. It is not comfortable, it is not fun, but doing so let me meet your father. Let me live and have you. Hold onto your hope. Keep going."_ )

Congratulations. You have made it past the largest die-off period.

Keep going.


	2. Going Nuts (But Staying Alive)

Here's what bare bones survival is;

Hard, all the goddamn time.

Maly sweats beneath the sun, feels like she is roasting alive inside her mock armor and scarf. There is no AC, no fans, no ice for the water which tastes of the heated metal bottle it rests in. Her body is itchy, her clothes stiff, her muscles sore.

She has three main concerns at all times. Food, water, and safety. She'd add shelter to that list, but hers comes in the form of the glorified tarp that is her hammock.

Water is the biggest issue with how much she moves. She worries about microbes and contaminants like heavy metals and spilled chemicals as she flirts with sources, tracing the Mississippi back to tributaries without a name, moving slow and steady as time wears on. Sometimes she gets lucky and finds old well systems or bottles, but more often than not she ends up digging gypsy wells, filtering with gravel, dirt, tampons, and boiling the holy hell out of it.

Food is her next biggest trial. She knows her limits, and as such realizes that she is ill-equipped to take on bigger urban areas where the gangs and militia scavenge. She doesn't have the firepower or the resources to gamble with.

So Maly scrounges, foraging like an animal. She plays numbers games with snares when she can, tying fishing line in poachers knots and setting as many as she can feasibly check. She scouts along the edges of the waterways, jabbing frogs with whittled sticks and using their guts to bait hooks for fish. She gets incredibly good and skinning, gutting, and plucking once she stops caring about how dirty she gets. It comes to the point where she can field strip an animal as she walks, checking mealy livers for spots and slick digestive tracks for parasites before she tosses scraps to the dogs, all the while her feet moving mechanically beneath her. Maly eats everything she knows she can, from the wild onions and garlic, bugs and lip puckeringly sour muscadine grapes, to rare packaged foods she takes from the occasional shack she runs across. Whatever is there to be eaten.

It's gross. God knows it isn't always tasty, and for all her hard work she still loses weight before her digestive track stops rioting and her skills catch up.

Safety is her biggest concern, and the main reason she hasn't eaten Meatsack and the meat-pack. The dogs -which are quickly growing in numbers and filthy to the point where sometimes she shoves them in rivers just to get away from the stink- are useful as hell. Maly and the canines quickly hash out a working relationship. When Meatsack's ears perk and twitch, she stills herself and strains her senses. If the dogs are edgy and uneasy, she proceeds with all due caution. When the pack cuts and runs, Maly bugs the fuck out, loping on with them through the woods like a stereotypical YA protagonist because, for all it is cliche bullshit, the meat-pack knows what's up.

It's a symbiotic thing. They are animals and she can trust them to act as such. She knows that they see her as a source of food one way or another, the same way she sees them.

Likewise, she can trust the dead to follow certain patterns. Their natural enemy is gravity, their desiccated muscles meaning that they follow the slopes of the earth down instead of up. They are triggered more by noise than sight, which she blames on the fact that whatever filmy shit that builds up on their corneas during sickness hardens after death and probably really fucks up their ability to see. In fact, most of their soft tissues film up and harden, which is why they still have teeth and are so resistant to rot and decay.

They are resilient, which she find out when she watches one take out a meat-pack member after said dog tore out its Achilles. They can move without hearts, shamble with desiccated muscles and shattered limbs. They do not get sick, do not tire, do not sleep. They seem to have no baseline to keep, no requirements for sustaining themselves. Often times they have numbers on their side, traveling in hoards and popping up as a surprise, which was a given after the fiasco in near the riverlands.

But they are dumb.

They get distracted easily by noise and bright light, drawn like moths to large flames in which they burn themselves. When given multiple targets they have trouble choosing, so the barking of many dogs and her own echoed ones befuddle them. They do not anticipate traps and can be drawn straight into them.

And they _smell_. Here, away from the cities and towns where the stink is so heavy she goes noseblind, it is distinctive. Not earth or dog or shit, but _rot_. Sour notes that linger, hiding just under the twang of leaf litter and sweat, scent stronger the closer they come. She rarely has time to notice it; the dogs always get it before she does.

She can survive the dead.

People, she does not chance.

Maly is acutely aware that she lives in a very big and very isolated glass house -what with flitting around the woods with a bunch of mutts while copying animal noises and eating bugs and all- but people are sketchy.

It stings in a way. She knows socialization is a requirement for health, and as much as the mimicry games keep her occupied and the meat-pack keeps her company, she is hungry for human interaction. She is aware of her craving for companionship and a form of communication that is not robin calls exchanged with actual birds, or quiet shifts in body language with dogs, but she also knows it isn't safe.

The evil she witnessed in that camp sticks with her, a lesson learned. There is no stability cropping back up, no safety in the groups she has seen. She stays far, far away.

It has been one hundred and eight days since she left her apartment.

* * *

Distance and time begin to lose value to her.

She has a map and a direction, but the woodlands and wild places she sticks to are so vast and all encompassing she wonders if she dreamt up things like state lines and cities. She sees such sights as she travels; strong cedars and pines jutting from ravines in defiance of all that should be, endless woods with sepia leaf covered ground, and rivers that snake beyond what she can conceive. It stretches for days and weeks and months, riverland woods melting into rocky ledges and forested foothills. There is nothing but her, the wild, and the meat-pack.

Time becomes something she notices idly in the form of sun sets and sunrises rather than hours and dates. It doesn't really matter now. She has nowhere to be and no reason to keep track of it. No more pressure about remembering birthdays or holidays. No pressure to do anything but survive. Everything else becomes extra, and even her destination falls from her mind.

She shuffles around with the meat-pack, roaming.

It occurs to her that maybe she is losing too many of her civilized aspects. She considers it in detail as she scrubs with gravel at her hair covered legs, too tired to give a shit about them anymore. Then again when she passes by a headless corpse, and is only upset because it has nothing to take.

When she reflexively punches Meatsack straight in the head for snapping at her in the middle of cleaning a turtle, she thinks of it.

The dog yelps and startles back from the blow, watching her with wary amber eyes, the entire lower half of it caked with muck.

Somewhere in her head, she knows that she would not have punched a dog before this. Before she had gone months without speaking actual words or even _seeing_ people. But it happens distantly, like a remembering a non-important event.

More pressing is the way Meatsack watches her, edging closer and closer with its head down low and steps light. That and the way seven other dogs consider them both, numbers always changing, losing some and then gaining more.

They are all lean, all hungry and overworked.

Maly waits, up to her wrists in turtle blood and boots sunken into the mud. She does not flinch from Meatsack's eyes, holds as steady and strong as the earth itself. She thinks of how warm its fur is when the days are long and cold, how many times the meat-pack has kept her safe. How she has traded exhausted groans with them in the night, how far she has run with them.

Meatsack feigns a lunge.

She huffs out half through her nose and half through her mouth, exasperated and unimpressed.

The koolie mix measures her for a very long moment, searching for a give. A sign that she could be brought down, that the food could be taken.

She remains unyielding, starring every one of those dogs in the eye until they look away first. So they know what she knows. She is still stronger, and she can kill them.

And like that it's over, Meatsack whining for scraps, and another one settling at her back like it wasn't going to get her from behind.

It is not the first or the last time the dogs test her, but it is the first time Maly recognizes that the carefully cultivated traits she learned to operate in a civil society have withered away like crops in an untended field. As she picks charred meat that tastes of silt and burnt pond scum from a burned shell with her bare hands, displaying her teeth at the mutts that come too close, she wonders why it doesn't bother her more.

She figures it might have something to do with the fact she has spent two hundred and twenty-one days alone with fucking dogs.

* * *

People scare her.

Animals are animals and the dead are the dead, but people are _gambles_. They can be wild, cruel, compassionate, caring, or a thousand combination of the things in between. Those two days she spent in a tree pissing down through leaves because she was too scared to touch ground around such people remain with her. As much as Maly acknowledges she's slowly going batshit crazy without company, she still realizes that she's _alive_ to go batshit.

So she continues roaming, walking the earth, barely scraping by.

Once she lived a life with bug spray. With showers. With warm blankets and space heaters, though the winters here aren't even remotely as bad as they were up north. Maly had access to internet and phones and basic fucking electricity, along with downtime for such things instead of busting ass all day just to draw breath for one more sunrise.

It is what it is, though, and she's still alive.

Two hundred and eighty-six days after she left her apartment, she grunts as she cracks through the temple of the staggering corpse of a teenage girl, because fuck it all, she's still here.

* * *

Maly still doesn't know how she comes across it. Maybe it was chance, or luck, or even divine providence.

It's a church after all.

It's nestled in the confines of the Cherokee National Forest and the Nantahala, surrounded by nothing but little towns that are perfect for her raids. Even when infrastructure was in place this was backwoods. Roving gangs leave it largely untouched because the pickings here cannot support numbers without organization, though she once saw a car with a white cross drive by. True, the dead are a bit thicker here than deeper in the woods, but the food here is easier to gather than out there in the dead of winter, and the shelter better than her lone hammock.

Which is why she chose the area in the first place, hitting the small towns during the day while the meat-pack roams around, and scouting for outlying buildings she might rest in away from the main drag.

The church is one such building she considers, and it would be perfect save for one fact.

There's a man inside that church. Only one. A priest, if his clothes are to be believed.

She watches him.

The first thing Maly takes note of is that he doesn't look like he has been scraping by. He looks healthy and clean, his bronze skin clear of debris and wear. He looks strong as well, which makes her nervous, but the fact that his first reaction when faced with a single wandering corpse is to flee like a startled hare comforts her. He does not seem likely to initiate a confrontation.

The man reads a lot, going over the scriptures again and again. Unsettlingly, he also draws. Maly sees pictures of burning bushes and angels through the windows, crayon drawings completed with all the skill of an eight-year-old. Sometimes he looks at photographs for long moments in utter silence before turning to the altar and praying. She's pretty sure he has no weapons, nothing other than a solid shelter and a stash of cans lined near a pew.

He's nervous, on edge, disturbed, and she's pretty sure he's survived this long by luck.

Maly weighs the options. On one hand, he's flighty and unstable. On another hand, the gathering is good here and she hasn't seen a human in months.

On day three hundred and ten, Maly decides to attempt tentative territory cohabitation.

* * *

Here's the thing; she doesn't mean to, which isn't to say she doesn't mean for it to happen. She knew it would occur eventually when she stopped sneaking around. A part of her craved it, the same part of her that probably decided to travel close enough for him to hear.

She doesn't think of what it will seem like to the priest, how it will look when a figure obscured by worn leather and covered in filth walks through the woods with twelve scraggly dogs fanning out between the trees. She does not consider that she is in any way out of place with her scarf wrapped around her face to keep the chill at bay, or that maybe the machete by her side is threatening.

She is fine.

He is not.

His bald head whips around to face her and he stiffens at the top of the church steps, frozen at the sight of her. His nut colored eyes widen, flickering from her to the dogs, then back again.

He starts to sweat despite the briskness of the morning.

"For dogs have surrounded me; A band of evildoers has encompassed me," he mutters.

They are the first words Maly has heard in months other than her own occasional grumblings, and as of late they have been less words and more vocalizations. Even though she knows he could talk, saw his lips moving in prayer, she did not expect his voice to have the effect is does.

Her eyes shutter at the sound, and it takes her a second for her to even remember that they are _words_ , right and proper words. Not warbling bird songs, not gnashing teeth and rasping wet groans, not buzzing crickets, not barks or yips or groans.

She savors them before she works out that they do not have a complimentary meaning.

Her own mouth opens, and she wants to negate what he said because it's patently untrue, but her tongue is clumsy in her mouth and her brain doesn't really catch up with her. It's like the communicative part of her head has gone screwy. All she ends up doing is bending her knees slightly in case she has to move and raising her empty hands to show him there is nothing there.

Out of the corner of her eye she sees Meatsack cock its head curiously.

The man seems to not understand the action at first, waiting for her to do something. In return, Maly waits for him to do something as well.

The wait stretches on.

The dogs shift uneasily, a few of them edging their way to his blind spots. He seems understandably discomforted by the action, so Maly makes a noise in her throat to get them to stop.

The dogs lift their heads to stare at her, as does the priest.

Maly waits.

Around them, birds greet the daylight with their usual songs, dogs snuffle, and the wind rustles through the leaves. She smells spicy pine and wet earth on the air, and her eyes remain glued to the man. She wishes he would say something else.

He doesn't though. He just looks around him, scared and cornered near the door of his church.

Meatsack makes a noise, growing disinterested with the whole ordeal. He begins to pad off towards the town proper, and the restlessness in her bones suggest she do the same. There is only so much daylight to burn. If she wants to make any progress digging a pitrap outside the school to funnel the dead into, she has to get going.

She flicks her eyes to the man, gauging him. He looks like he's about to keel over and in no way wants to talk.

A shame, she thinks. She would have sat and listened.

Three hundred and twelve days after it all began, Maly keeps going.


	3. Things to do, places to go, people to-

Maly is only one woman, and there is tons to do to stay safe and alive.

It took a full week of digging to make a pit outside the school's door big enough to fit all the dead. It only took two minutes after she finally managed to get a rock through the glass of said door for them to break the hinges with their weight and cascade in, their sunken eyes and hungry hands reaching for her on the opposite edge where she made noise.

It's ridiculously satisfying, a choke-point and trap done so cleanly, but also exhausting because the hole had to be so damn big. She spends fucking forever jabbing their heads with an improvised pike, the sharpened branch heavy in her hands as she ensures her safety.

It's worth it, though. The schoolhouse stinks of rotted bodies packed inside a sun-heated enclosed space for nearly a year, and there are bits of flesh scraped along the tiles and walls, but inside it is un-scavenged because of the dead that once resided there.

It has all the items a school typically has, but the most import she finds on the fluid and mold dotted shelves of the cafeteria. A heap of industrial cans of food, the kind meant for feeding dozens. Though a few are bloated and warped with what she suspects may be deadly botulism, most are unscathed. There's also a school nurse's station with some medical supplies, mostly antacids, NSAID's, and tubes for cuts and scrapes, but a few of the children must have had ongoing illnesses because there are other medications there. Even better, there's a lice comb and shampoo.

Maly eyes the meat-pack.

That night, she feasts on canned vegetables that taste almost impossibly sweet to her after so long without traces of sugar. She and the disgruntled meat-pack stink of chemicals, but they forgive her the transgression of bathing them all because they have grub as well. Three cans between them all for the half of one she eats. It takes a lot to feed this many dogs, but for once she can do it in full and doesn't have to wait for them to add her to the menu. It feels good to do it, to provide for the scraggly mutts she has come so far with, to be clean and bug-free.

Elsewhere, on a church doorstep, there is a pack of paints and colored pencils for a disturbed artist, a note made with classroom paper signed with her name resting on top.

Day three hundred and twenty-four ends on a good note.

* * *

As small as it is -at its prime boasting a laughable population when compared with even tiny cities- the town itself is still laden with the dead. Some roam the maze of streets, and she watches them stumble about knowing that it doesn't look like many.

It only ever takes one.

She mulls it over in her head, the meat-pack wandering away as they are wont to do at times, straying here and there but returning for meals now and again. Sometimes a few will break off to leave for days, and some leave to never be seen again.

Maly wants what's inside the buildings, knows that there has to be more stashes like the school cafeteria. She wouldn't particularly mind if she stumbled upon a better hammock either, or new boots. The inside soles of these ones crapped out a hundred miles ago and keep bunching around when she puts her feet in.

But the high concentration of the dead makes her hesitate. She wants to be rid of them all.

She considers pitfalls again, but the amount of energy she would have to exert would be exponential. That's many, many, many very big holes. With the amount of activity it would require she would burn through food in a rush, and then be left weaker than before. Tripwires only slow them, punji traps aren't fit for this enemy, tiger traps have no guarantee of hitting the head, and fire destroys the resources she wants while sending up a signal for miles around.

Maly is stumped. She can't clear the area for good. More walkers will always wander in from the woods anyway.

Unhappy, she puts aside the idea of being completely safe and cleansing the town completely.

The only thing she can do is carefully start at the edges work her way in, one by one. She steps lightly on the cracking pavement, makes just enough noise and attention to draw a few emaciated dead towards her, their rotting skin sloughing off in places and open wounds oozing ever so slowly in the open air. She leads them away from the fringes of the town proper, into the shade of the trees. They come for her, moaning and sour smelling, meat caked between their snapping teeth.

One at a time, she takes her machete and cleaves their softening skulls, her arms aching from the strength she uses to make sure she land a good blow, over and over and over again.

She does it for days before she decides it's safe enough to try and raid a building.

It's a fucking mistake.

Inside of it, there is only more dead. One rips her leather jacket with its nails as she scrambles out a window to get away, falling on her hand. She's so intent on running she doesn't notice three of her fingers are bent the wrong way until she's sprinted a mile and a half into the depths of the woods.

She's passing the church coated in fetid fluids, cradling her awkwardly angled fingers near her breast, and cursing the hole in her jacket when something draws her eyes.

Resting on the handrails is a hastily penned thank you note.

On day three hundred and forty-nine, she learns the priest goes by Father Gabriel, and that resetting bones is an exercise in resolve and breath-taking agony.

* * *

Splinted fingers mean that she can't thin the dead safely, or do much of anything that she wants. She has food and water stocked up, and her body gained some weight, but for now she doesn't chance town again.

Maly wanders back into the woods for some reason she can't place.

It's harder to forage with only one good hand, but there are things here that she couldn't get from buildings. The air is fresher, not tainted by the proximity to rotting flesh. There is chickweed and Solomon's seal poking here and there, lambs quarter bullying its way up through the soil next to rocky outcroppings. The robins still chirp in the mornings, the jays crying out in the day.

The woods are as they always were. There is no constant reminder here of a life before.

She wanders across a wreckage southwest of the town, four days away. A white van with crosses on the back windows, driven off into a ditch. It still works, gas tank nearly empty, papers inside proclaiming it the property of Grady Memorial Hospital. Nothing else, though. It's been stripped clean.

Some members of the meat-pack sniff their way around it, one going so far as to pee on a tire.

She keeps on going, making fairly good time on her way to nowhere at all. She finds a sign on railroad tracks that were probably abandoned even before it all went to hell. It promises her sanctuary, and helpfully marks a location on a map not far away.

Maly remembers the camp she saw, considers what the words proclaim.

She decides that the only sanctuary she trusts is the one she will make herself.

She roams back on day four hundred, dirty and tired, her hand healing and boots completely trashed.

* * *

Never once does she think that her absence was noted, but apparently it had been. Passing the church on her way back from her work in town, the scratched door opens with such a large and sudden bang Maly jumps back, her heart in her throat and body weight shifted for movement.

Father Gabriel is beaming at her, teeth bared in a smile so wide it must hurt. He looks delighted.

"You!" He proclaims at her.

Alarmed, Maly stares at him with wide eyes. She nods slowly as the sounds untangle themselves in her brain and form words with actual meaning, because yes. _Her_.

"You're back," he says. A part of her wonders how he keeps his teeth so clean while another part screams that him showing them to her in the first place heralds a bad time.

He starts down the steps towards her, and Maly steps back and away from him, unsure of his reason.

He freezes, staring at her. His smile wavers on his face as he looks her over, and she wishes she knew what he saw there if only to predict what comes next.

"You are alive," he says again, but there is conflict on his face. Emotions she can't place warring inside. The smile is less joyous now.

People are hard, she thinks. People are gambles.

People scare her.

She wets her lips beneath her mother's scarf, focusing on the sounds she wants to make. She knows this. Just move air up from her lungs, contract her chest muscles, push it over her throat, and use her lips and tongue to shape it.

Her voice comes out firm and unwavering.

"Yes."

On day four hundred and sixteen she manages her first word in forever, and it feels foreign in her mouth.

* * *

The priest carries a dangerous sort of burden with him wherever he goes. It weighs down on his shoulders, sits tight on the line of his brow. He's nervous and afraid, never wandering far from his church, always running from even the most emaciated of the dead.

He doesn't like the meat-pack and seems skittish around her at the best of times. She picks up on his sweats, the way he tries to overcompensate for his fear by tensing all his muscles and smiling plasticly. He is afraid of her, afraid of everything, and for the most part he sticks to himself inside his unfairly clean church.

But he talks, sometimes.

In another life, she wouldn't have even considered resting her aching bones on some backwater porch steps near the sketchy priest. But his voice fills a void she has felt for a long time, the steady thrum of language filling her ears. At first there is a disconnect there, and it takes just a little too long to sort of the meaning behind the words. It doesn't help that his body language is equally whacked, his lips saying one thing while his muscles scream another, sermons and verses coming out of his mouth when his eyes show guilt, fear, and hope. It confuses her, makes her wary.

Her comfort comes in the fact that she can take him.

She whittles away eternities at a time ranging. Ends up saying fuck the effort and low resources, she's gone with less before. She builds some traps around the dwindling stash in the school, remembers the map she saw, the danger people of people. The river-reed punji stakes cost her a dog, but it was very dumb one so she doesn't mourn its loss too heavily.

The incident itself does make her think. She knows where the traps are, but others do not. Specifically Father Gabriel.

In the interest of not accidentally killing the only human contact she has, she circles areas he should most definitely avoid on a pilfered map and hands it to him when she drops off food from a healthfood place several days north. He's getting low on cans, and she figured he might like sulfur-laden dried fruit.

He blanches at the paper while Maly flexes her blistering feet, clothes heavily stained with whatever shit spews out of the shambling corpses. Her arms ache from swinging a machete and she is tired as all hell, but the haul was fair enough.

The priest makes a weak sound in his throat, high and animal like. It attracts the attention of the dogs, and hers.

He stiffens under their gaze, already sweating.

Maly says nothing.

Four hundred and eighty days in, and she washes boots she pulled off a beetle-infested corpse in a river as the meat-pack snarls over the carcass of a raccoon.

* * *

Maly wakes one day, cocooned in her hammock high in the branches of a tree. She does as she always does, listening for something amiss before peeking out at her surroundings.

The forest immediately around her is the same as it was last night. Pine needles and leaf litter cover the ground, dog track in the dirt, river burbling nearby. The birds are singing, winds blowing, the sun rising in the sky.

What is different is the black smoke slowly curling itself upwards on the horizon.

She scowls.

On day five hundred and eight she figures of course there would be a threat of fire.

* * *

The smoke she saw a few days ago is still visible if she climbs to the top of the tree and looks southeast, just barely visible black tendrils against the blue sky.

The meat-pack is nervous, which makes her wary as well. She checks her pack, her machete, her traps- everything she can, waiting to run.

It comes, but not in the way she expects.

A shout rends the air on her way into town. It's in the only voice she knows these days, the one that has read her verses and sermons, conjuring images of fake smiles and stiff shoulders in her head.

She's loping towards the cries for help before she registers why, only thinking of the hunger she sometimes feels, the gaping need for another human. The meat-pack shifts with her, ears perked and heads down low, spread out like in groups of twos and threes. They slip forward on quiet feet that make her own footfalls sound thunderous, slinking forms that slip between vines and brambles in a way she can't. They are jittery, anxious. Something is setting them off.

The voice gets louder the closer she comes, then it goes quiet altogether. Pushing harder she prepares herself for the worst.

Then Maly realizes she straight up lied to herself because she only thought Father Gabriel would be dead, set upon by something and torn to shreds. This is not that. This is the genuine worst; Father Gabriel slipping down from a boulder surrounded by a big group with many guns.

Many, _many_ fucking guns.

They are everything Father Gabriel wasn't when she first saw him, that he still isn't. Dirty and unclean, sweat soaking their skin and worn clothes. There is a hardness in most their eyes, a way they carry themselves around, like soldiers in a troop. Even a small glimpse tells her these people are especially tough, a band of badasses with 'Do Not Fuck With' practically stamped across their foreheads. They scan their surrounding and pick them apart, weapons held close and faces grave.

She feels fear, feels it squeeze her heart and lungs until it is a tangible pain.

They see her.

"Rick!"

Maly is already digging her heels into the ground to slow her charge down the slope, hands reaching for a sappling to swing herself in the other direction on. A machete will do jack against an AR-15. She's not stupid, but she is afraid.

"Are those dogs?!"

"Get him!"

Maly yelps short and sharp, and receives four of them in return from the meat-pack, the others silent as they skitter around. She catches the young tree and swings herself hard, palms scraping on the bark, her momentum making it bow. There's crashing in the leaves behind her, heavy footsteps, and beneath that the sound of shouldered guns.

She tilts, planning on weaving, but doesn't get that far.

A weight crashes into her waist, knocking the air from her lungs and sending her to the ground. She smells body odor not her own, an arm snaking around her to pin her. It's awkward with her pack still on, heavy and hard to breathe.

But she is running on terror and nearly seventeen months of hard labor, throwing her elbows back and writhing. She feels something connect, hears a grunt among even more footsteps, and the arm loosens.

Maly claws at the ground and thrashes herself free, kicking her foot back as she pushes herself up for good measure. She hears cursing and snarling the same second she feels a different hand on her shoulder pulling her back.

There's a flash of merle coat and pained grunt. The fingers holding her go weak for just a fraction of a second, but it is enough for her to wrench free. She takes a step forward, rapidly followed by another, and another. She's gaining momentum again, bruised with dirt smeared across her face where she fell.

 _Keep going_ , she hears her mother's voice say. _Keep going, Maly Smith_.

She makes it two full yards before she's taken to the ground again, this time from the side. Somebody else's sweat is flung into her eyes, and she winces at the sting of it. Her arms raise up to try and shove them away, but the person is already moving upward. Their knees lock around her hips while they roll her onto her back, pinning her.

Another blur of merle, a thud, and a pained canine yelp. Anger momentarily overtakes fright and she bucks hard, managing to budge her attacker approximately the length of a mosquitoes dick. She tries swinging, snapping her teeth and vocalizing because she needs to know, needs to _hear_ -

A fist hits her so hard in the head she sees black for a second.

The world comes back in a blink, but she can't understand it. Her ears are ringing and she's disoriented, thoughts sluggish as if her brain is made from molasses. She keens in her throat, her senses jumbled, barks and snarls registering distantly.

"Stop."

The word warbles in her ears, and she turns up to face the source of the noise. He's scraggly with devil blue eyes, his beard a few days old. His cheeks are burnt red, and his unwashed hair is dripping sweat onto her face.

Dazedly she thinks of the camp, of the evil there. There is a man on top of her, a big group with guns, and she can't reach a pen knife let alone her machete. They can take her, and in her punch-drunk head she thinks that will be worse.

Maly thrashes and takes another blow, this one jarring her enough to still her struggles and leave her stunned.

Somewhere, among all the noise she barely registers, a baby starts crying.

"It ain't what you think," he tells her. The words sink slowly into comprehension, a strange focal point amidst the peals of sound. "Call off the dogs. Stop."

Maly blearily stares up at the man, instinctively looking for a give, a sign that he could be taken down, that she could flip this.

She finds none.

On day five hundred and eleven, Maly stops.


	4. It is what it is

Maly goes still beneath her attacker, panting for breath, her skull throbbing. She rests against the ground, the dirt and leaf litter a hard pillow beneath her head, her pack digging into her back.

The barking and snarling dies down, and as her senses coming swimming back she can hear the near-silent sound of many paws retreating back, stepping quickly and cautiously.

But still there, hanging around the edges.

It's strange to know that a pack of wild animals has gone this far for her. There's no damn reason they should have stuck around, not since she first fell. They should have left her ass, should have never barreled along with her in the first place. She noticed they were off when she was running and now knows they smelt the gunmetal and human stink before she saw the group. They knew before she did, and they should have stopped. She should have read them and turned back.

But they came, they fought, and that's a conundrum for another time.

Someone approaches the man and her both, boots crunching through pine needles and twigs, but the whole time she's keeping her eyes locked against the strangers, his look as hard as steel.

They've seen a lot of shit, those eyes.

"Dad," someone says. Young, male.

Maly slowly glances over the man's shoulder, and the strangest sight greets her. A teenager -which is already odd- but even weirder is the hiccuping baby in his arms. She stares at it in confusion, her attention captured by fat cheeks and the small game noises coming from its mouth. It's no bigger than a raccoon, soft and vulnerable. It should not be.

"What's your name?"

It's the father, and she turns away from the impossible thing to meet his unwavering stare. She considers a lot in that second, her head and sides aching, her thoughts dulled and fear still present.

"Maly."

The name gets drawn out a fraction of a second too long. Her lips just manage to make the shape. Her voice is even, though, her tone solid.

"How many walkers have you killed?"

She's sluggish in response, her face impassive as she tries to gather his meaning. There haven't been casual pedestrians since this began, and even then she doesn't understand why she would have killed them.

"The dead," supplies the boy helpfully. "How many of the dead have you killed?"

She understands then, but still, it takes time to shape the words in her mouth. There is precision in the language, a subtle working of tongue and lips and throat. It's been a long ass time, and there's something incredibly difficult about the simple act of talking. She didn't need it out there, and the skill is rusty from disuse. She can read the impatience in the man's hard gaze as he waits, the threat.

"Two...two hundred fifty or more."

It's a guess on her part. She doesn't actually know, but it's been five hundred and eleven days, and if she killed one of the dead every other day, that would be a safe bet. Even if she didn't -only killed one every four days- there's the clearing in town to consider.

The unforgiving expression bores down, and even the boy is watching her intently. It sounds like a lot now that she's said it out loud, but it's a fair estimate. Maybe even low.

"How many people have you killed?" he asks.

That answer is easier to give, but it still takes a moment for her to shape the sounds. To make sure her voice is steady despite her resigned fear and the words come out right.

"None."

Another drop of sweat trails down a tendril of his soaking hair, gathering at the tip. It slips off, falling onto her jacket. His knees are digging painfully into her bruised ribs and the world is a fucking carousel of leaves and people she can only glimpse from the corner of her eyes.

" _Why._ "

He draws the word out, hard on the 'wh' and lingering on the 'i' sound. It is a demand, not a question.

"There was no one to kill."

There just wasn't. She spent eternity in the wilderness with dogs until civility withered and thorns took seed in its place. All to avoid groups like these, anything and everything to just keep going.

But it is what it is, and there is no changing that.

That's what she tells herself when the man touches her thigh. She swallows and her breathing picks up, but she grits her teeth because it is what it is and there is a big group with guns. There are a teenager and a baby behind him, watching, but she knows humans can be savage. Bile surges in her throat as she plays dead.

"Dad," the boy calls again softly.

The man says nothing as his hand moves, jerking roughly around her leg to the sheath of her machete until he can undo the strap holding the blade in. He tugs the tool out and hands it back behind him blindly. The boy takes it with the baby still supported in his other arm.

"Any more weapons?"

Maly swallows roughly. He is not violating her, but taking her weapons might mean he's removing any risk of harm to himself first.

He doesn't wait for a response from her this time and starts patting down her coat brusquely, being none too gentle about the movements.

She averts her gaze upwards to the clear blue sky just barely peeking through the leaf-laden branches above them to distract herself from the seemingly inevitable, burning the scenery into her head. She feels him take a penknife she robbed from the bait shop over a year ago now, then another, and another. He slips the cord from her pockets, and the fishing hooks stored there as well.

Then he goes to her jacket, his hands tugging down the zipper to reveal the stained shirt beneath. He runs the back of his hands down her sides and then beneath her breasts as he searches her, pausing at the folding knife clipped on her sports bra.

He glares.

"Take it off."

The meat-pack skitters around the edge of her hearing; baby cries, gunmetal, and a group of people making them antsy.

Maly can fucking relate.

The man grunts like she's being difficult and tugs at her shirt. She sucks in air through her teeth, fear bubbling up inside her.

" _Rick_ ," comes a woman's voice. Stern. Admonishing.

"She has a knife."

"She is surrounded by strangers with guns, and a man has her pinned to the ground like an animal, yanking at her shirt," the woman replies.

She sees his jaw grit, but his hands fall away like she scalded him.

"The knife has to go."

"Then I will get it," The woman replies.

There is movement, and Maly sees long dreads out of the corner of her eyes, but her sight is glued on the rifle that swings into view. Half a heartbeat is all it takes for the pocket knife to be removed from the bra, a hand reaching down the front to keep her shirt in place. The clear blue returns as the woman moves back, interspersed with the gold lit green leaves.

"The pack too," Rick orders.

Maly cocks her jaw as they remove it, dragging the straps from her shoulders and tugging it from beneath her. She hears the fabric rustle as they go through it, items jostled around.

"Some food. Water. Camping gear," says a new voice gruffly.

There's the familiar crinkling of plastic and a heavy pause.

"Tampons," drawls the woman.

"Got a med kit. No guns, no lil pig stickers," continues the gruff one, as if he didn't hear. "Just a bunch a snares n' some sharpened sticks. Could be triggers or stakes for the things, but they ain't got notches and there's a damn ton."

Rick, bearded and scraggly, looks up above her head where she can't see. He considers whatever is there heavily before turning back.

"The stakes. What are they for?" he demands.

She swallows, face impassive as she stares up. Her tongue swipes over her lips, her throat flexing so she can get the right tone.

It's not fast enough for him, or else he thinks she's stalling. His hand grabs her shoulder harshly and he shakes her hard enough her head thumps against the ground again.

" _The stakes_ -"

"Please!" pleads a voice from a distance. "Please, she sets traps with them, for animals and the dead."

Maly inhales sharply, her aching head turning ever so slightly in an attempt to see Father Gabriel. In the still, unyielding parts of her mind, she recognizes that her wish to rescue him lead to this. She should have just left him instead of coming, should have never given into the part of her that yearned for companionship other than the meat-pack.

"I have a map where she marked them out at the church," Father Gabriel continues. "I can give it to you."

Rick's grasp on her loosens but does not go completely. He looks over his shoulder, down the slope where the rest of the group waits. He seems to weigh the options in his head for a moment, checking the face of those around him before coming to a decision.

He stands, yanking her to her feet as well. For a moment her head spins and she lists to one side, feeling every bruised part of her pulse.

"We go to the church. The priest will lead, just in case. Everyone step lightly and keep an eye out."

* * *

Guns are kept at the ready as they follow Father Gabriel under the hot sun, waiting for the meat-pack skittering between the trees to do anything that might warrant an attack. The dark skinned woman who jacked her bra-knife keeps glancing at Maly like she's a puzzle, her eyes curious but her face stoic, and the man that pinned her is right behind her, keeping her within arms reach, a rifle in his hands.

His son, it seems, find the wild mutts to be riveting.

"What's their names?" he asks, bumping the now quiet baby in his arms further up his hip, freeing an arm. He uses it to point to a familiar merle coat yards and yards away, half obscured by undergrowth and leaves. "Like that one. What's it called?"

Maly feels lightheaded and pained, her mouth dry and skin sweaty. She can't figure the dogs out, or the people. Why on earth are the dogs tailing them, and why would she feel up to speaking when she just had her ass ground into the dirt? Why talk when she is being kept in a group with guns, and they have stripped her of everything?

There is no good reason.

"Meatsack," she hears herself say after a long pause, despite all of it. "And the meat-pack."

Somebody snorts behind her.

The boy glances at her, the wide brim of his hat keeping the sun of his pale and youthful face. He has his father's eyes, she thinks, but not as haunted. Not yet as hard.

"You okay? You sound kinda funny and Dad got you pretty hard."

Maly shifts her head slightly, looking between the trees. If she's honest, she thinks somethings wrong with her head in more than just one way.

"I don't talk so well," she states carefully.

'Because I have spent like a year alone with dogs and I think that screwed with the communications part of my brain. That and the urge to speak never overtook me around the jittery priest, neverminding the fact I was a social recluse before this,' is the follow-up that doesn't quite make it out.

"Oh," the boy says simply. "That's why you take so long to talk back?"

Maly nods her head and the boy looks behind her where his father walks. A glance back shows a grimace crossing the man's face, one that looks edged with regret.

"Hey."

Maly turns toward the man with her pack. He's walking just off to the side, keeping pace with them at an angle. His steps are light and sure, a crossbow of all things in his hands. There's a stringer of squirrels across his shoulders, which is more than Maly can usually catch in a day.

"You watchin us last night?"

Maly stares at him.

He stares back, waiting.

Figuring he's actually waiting for her to say something and not reading her blank face, she deigns verbally answer the asinine question.

"No."

"The priest?"

Maly glances at the priest, then back at the man as if to say 'him? For real?'

The man narrows his eyes at her as if he thinks she's hiding something.

"Maybe she's lying," Father Gabriel chimes in from up front. "Maybe this is all an elaborate trap that we somehow concocted a plot despite never knowing you were there, and there's a group in the church waiting to ambush you so we can steal your squirrels."

There's a strange moment where Maly cannot actually believe what he just said. It's so unlike anything he's ever spoken to her, unlike the sermons and the verses.

Father Gabriel turns back, a grin on his face. It wavers when he sees the unmoved expressions of the people behind him.

"Members of my flock often told me my sense sense of humor leaves much to be desired."

She was unaware he had one.

"It does," the squirrel man affirms.

The priest turns back around, directly into a low hanging tree branch around the edges of the cleared gravel lot of the church. He speeds up a bit, fishing the keys to the doors out of his pocket and is fleeing up the steps when a voice stops him.

"Hold up," calls the man behind her. His hand is suddenly on her shoulder pulling her forward with him, and she stumbles a few steps before she manages to lengthen her steps. "Mind if we look around first?"

He stares down the man of god, reaching a palm out.

"Just want to keep our squirrels."

Gabriel hands over the keys silently.

A movement of the man's free arm has more of the group surging forward, weapons at the ready as he opens the lock. She feels the pressure of his fingers through her jacket, a silent threat.

"Any traps?"

She shakes her head.

"Then you won't mind going first."

He pushes open the door, and Maly can't get away from him fast enough, stepping forward pointedly. She's never been inside the cathedral before, but she's seen it through the shutters. It's just as wide and empty as she remembers it, clear of dust and stains. The light filters through the stained glass above the altar, casting it in a glow, but the shadows creep strangely between the pews. It's strangely surreal.

The armed group flows around her to the sides until she feels a tap on her back, a silent command to keep moving.

Maly complies, leading the way through each room as they sweep behind her. They pause at the open bibles scattered on the desk of what once was an office and linger long at the poorly drawn burning bushes. They check every inch, anywhere someone could hide, before gathering back out on the steps leading Maly along with them.

Rick hands over the key silently, and Father Gabriel smiles at him.

"I spent months here alone, holed up inside. If you found someone, I would be surprised."

"Alone?" asks the bearded man, voice heavy with skepticism. At once, attention is on her again and she stiffens beneath it.

"Maly and the dogs came around after nearly a full year. Just passed right by one day and left me to my business. I thought I imagined her before I found a gift on the doorstep and saw her again. Sometimes I still think I made her up because she disappears for so long."

A heavy pause.

"That the humor again?" asks the squirrel man.

Father Gabriel smiles weakly.

Rick, however, makes pointed eye contact with the woman who took her knife, his face solemn and drawn. He sighs deeply, like it's a trying ordeal for him, the captor.

"Michonne, keep an eye on her. I got more questions."

The woman nods, and the boy with the baby inclines his head at the priest while his father speaks with a giant of a man with fiery red hair.

"Thanks for this."

Father Gabriel smiles tighter and walks inside the church. As if there was much of a choice when faced wit this sort of force.

Maly's eyes leave him and she turns and looks to the trees as the people around her talk. She catches the meat-pack slinking along the shade lines, heads down and tails straight back as they step.

"-bus. Don't run, but I bet that can be fixed in a jiffy. Solid transportation-"

She meets amber eyes, and she watches the dogs as they watch the group. Her head swims and she's forced to shift her weight to avoid crashing down.

"-You understand what's at stake here?"

"I do," answers Rick.

"We have time take to take a breath," argues the woman.

"Taking a breath means slowing, slowing means shit inevitably goes down," retorts the giant.

"We need supplies," she stresses. "Whatever we do next."

The devil hovering near her looks up from the ground, nodding. He glances at her, then up to the church where the priest fled.

"That's right. We need water, food, and ammunition."

And then he's bounding up the steps, and Maly is left looking back at the mutts while the woman at her side gently takes her arm and follows him inside. Around her, the group is already laying their things out and making themselves comfortable on the pews and hard wooden floors, packs being removed from sweat soaked shoulders and sighs filling the air as they finally have a chance to sit down. Squirrel Killer is already setting to work skinning his catch, and she notices with hollow indignity he's using one of her penknives to cut slits around the tiny paws, the rest of them resting on her pack.

But her attention is swiftly taken back by the leader of this group, who has somehow acquired the child when she wasn't looking, carefully resting it on his hip. His son, she notices, is speaking to a short gray-haired woman, and the one named Michonne has stood her beside the priest.

"How did you survive so long? How did you get supplies?"

"Luck," answers Father Gabriel. "For me, at least. The annual canned food drive took place just before this all happened. The food lasted for a long time. I thought I was going to have to scavenge before Maly came with more."

Again the attention is on her, heavy and tangible.

"And you what? Hunted?"

This time, at least, he waits for her to think her words through.

"Trapping," she states with a steadiness she does not feel. "Foraging. Scavenging."

"So you already cleaned out everything nearby. The whole town empty?"

Maly remembers how much effort she has put forth whittling down the numbers of the dead in town, how many weeks and months she has spent trying ranging and clearing. How much damn work it took.

She looks at the man's solemn face and glances to all the guns around her. She could lie. She could say yes and keep everything a secret, but she doesn't think that will work in her favor.

"No. I did not need to take everything. I ranged," she admits.

"So what's left?"

She cocks her jaw.

"Some shops. The food bank."

He gives her an incredulous look, as do many of those who hear. She understands why. A food pantry is a good haul, one of the first places that should have been hit. She would have done it eventually after the school stash ran out, but it took forever just to get the town clear enough to go near it. That and the building itself stank so much even the dogs were wary of it, reeking of stagnant water and decay. She knew whatever was inside would take figuring out, and until her varied other resources ran dry she was hesitant to approach it.

"The food bank," the man states disbelievingly.

Maly flares her nostrils.

"I am one person," she states slowly. "And I was busy."

"With what?" asks the woman behind her.

"Traveling. Thinning the dead. Clearing other buildings."

"There a lot of walkers in town?"

"There was."

The man eyes her appraisingly.

"You're tilting," He points out evenly. It's just a statement of fact, nothing more to him. "You think you can stay upright all the way there?"

Maly straightens herself, knowing all the while that the reason she is having trouble with her balance is because the man in front of her clocked her not once, but twice in the head before shaking her hard enough to bang it against the ground. In a better world, she would have been able to cut and run before they got here, to dodge him and his group.

But that's not the world she lives in, and his question reveals a lot of things he does not actually say. He does not trust her statements and is already planning on organizing a group to go and take anything and everything they can. Not only that, but he doesn't want to leave her here while he does. It doesn't really matter if she can make it or not. If she doesn't keep up he could end her right here and now for being a hindrance, the way the meat-pack would.

Should've.

Again, a conundrum for a time when she isn't staring death in its icy eyes.

"I can."

"Good. He will go get the map and then you'll both lead us there. We'll bring back the food," the man declares.

Father Gabriel pales.

"I...I'm no good out there. Against those things-"

"Doesn't matter," The man states, exactly like she thought he would. "You're coming with."

"Me and Bob will come with," volunteers another woman, stepping up close with a scoped rifle in her hands.

Rick turns, the matter settled in his eyes and begins conversing with her, mentioning names she should grab onto. They slip by her, liquid mercury against the grasping hands of her thoughts. All Maly can do is watch with her feet firm beneath her, temple throbbing, dangerous people all around, and wait. She has no bag, no gear, no dogs here. She doesn't know what they want from her, or why they took her in the first place. Her throat hurts and she's pretty goddamn sure the head honcho gave her a concussion.

It is what it is _,_ she thinks to herself, breathing deep.

It. Is. What. It. Is.


	5. Unexpected Actions

One foot, then the other. Repeat.

The hot sun beats on her back, causes sweat to drip down her neck and gather in her palms. The heavy gaze of the people around her settle like a weight on shoulders, and the guns in their hands are the only thing keeping her from darting off to join the meat-pack ghosting their steps.

People are dangerous, she thinks. They scare her.

She keeps moving.

The town around her is desolate, red brick buildings jutting from concrete and asphalt. Kudzu vines have already latched onto the stone, and weeds have sprouted between the cracks in the sidewalk. The whole place is covered in a thin layer of filth, windows stained and dusty where they aren't broken, signs chipped and waving in the wind.

Nature continues on, a march of seasons and centuries. The earth plays a longer game than people, never wavering, and this town was but a spec on the map.

Maly steps around an abandoned car, the food bank coming into view on the backstreets near the residential part of town. She looks back for the briefest of moments to where the leader of the group stands beside a stiff looking Father Gabriel. The man tilts his head and gestures with his rifle as if to say ' _you first_.'

He's wary of traps despite the map.

With a grimace, Maly opens the door.

The smell that rolls out when she does is like a solid wall of hateful, eye-watering stench. She gags silently, bile crawling up her throat, and pushes her mother's scarf around her nose. It does a shit job of keeping out the stink and smells of BO and dirt itself, but even that comes as a relief.

She hears rasping, water, and the creaking of swollen wooden boards under her feet. There's a hole in the floor ahead, and she can see movement around the edges.

Someone pushes around her, and the hard barrel of a gun nudges her thigh as they walk past. It's the leader again, and he stalks up to the hole in the floor without hesitation, like the floor couldn't give out at any second.

A hand on her shoulder urges her after him, and a glance from the corner of her eye informs her it is the woman tasked with watching her, the one named Michonne.

They wander back to Rick's side and peer down into the abyss.

There must be more than a dozen dead ambling through waste high water, disfigured and misshapen by their rot. Each one looks like it's coated in mucus, slick and slippery as they bumble around shelves laden with food. Far too many for Maly to brave alone, though if she had the time she supposes she could have worked out a system to pick the supplies of with jerry-rigged branch tongs, or maybe a long net.

Too much work and too high of a risk, though. Easier to forage elsewhere. She didn't need to go here.

"Water been coming through the roof for a long time," Michonne rumbles lowly, head tilting around. "Slimed this place up good."

"If a sewer could vomit, it would smell like this," another adds, swallowing thickly.

Maly thinks that it actually smells a bit more like a morgue in the middle of the rainy season after the power has been cut for a month. It's that sort of wet stink, dense and moist, with meaty notes and hints of molded wood.

"We can use the shelves to block them," the woman with the scoped rifle suggests.

"Yeah, that's it, Sasha. There's our way. Down those shelves," Rick answers, standing from his crouch.

Maly eyes the water gathered below, chunks of flesh floating around and filmy patches of ooze drifting on the surface. She carefully observes the dead wandering about.

"Hey," the man says again, and when she looks up he's staring down Father Gabriel. "You're coming with us."

"I would just get in your way-"

"You're coming with. Both of you."

Father Gabriel furrows his brow and shuffles in place, but he gives. Rick turns to her with the same hard expression, a look that has no softness, no give.

She holds it.

"I don't have a weapon," Maly manages eventually.

"Stay with us and you won't get hurt."

"I am already injured because of you."

His expression remains fixed. There's a tension in the air alongside the stink as the others watch them.

He nods, glancing at the woman beside her. There's a sigh the sound of pockets being searched, and then Maly sees the folding knife that was once strapped to her bra in front of her face.

She takes it.

"You try anything and you die," Rick promises.

Maly looks pointedly at the gun in his hands, and then the rifle slung across the chest of the woman standing beside her as if to ask how stupid he thinks she is to try something with a four-inch blade.

There is no answer from him other than that hard stare as he walks forward, Father Gabriel following meekly behind him.

And then he goes past her, slinging his gun around to his back and walking up to the ledge. Around her his people do the same, readying weapons and following his lead. It's easy to tell he runs a good operation, that these people trust him.

Maly does not, but that doesn't matter when she's sandwiched between the woman who had her knife and the man with the faded green shirt. She's little more than cattle pushed along, unfolding the little knife in her hand until the edge of the floor gapes up at her, the top of a rickety looking shelf her next destination.

"Go! GO!"

The dead are already converging where he's dropped down, and Maly steps forward off the edge.

Only it's farther for her than it was for them, and her stature means she places her foot down on the top shelf hard. It tilts ever so slightly, just enough to send her rattled brain spinning in an attempt to correct her balance, overcorrect, and pitch her off the top.

The sound goes out for a second as the lukewarm, debris-laden water swallows her. She tucks her feet beneath her, pushing them down onto a slick but solid surface, re-emerging to the tune of barked orders. A quick glance tells her that the group is struggling to drag shelves around them in a half circle near the wall in order to form a barrier while the priest cowers back.

Head pounding, she sloshes forward to help drag shelves to slow the dead.

She manages to get one hand on a shelf before a stumbling cadaver gurgles as it comes near; the soft flesh of its cheeks rotted away, jaw hanging near its chest. It reaches forward with a bloated arm for whoever is next to her, and she shoves the little knife in her hand upward into the socket of its eye, the wet handle slick in her fingers. She feels the give of that hardened tissue, keeps pushing until the metal sinks up to her knuckles.

More are gathering, but the group is efficient and they manage to complete the flimsy barricade after a few short seconds. The blade of a machete flashes out of the corner of her eye, and the steady sound of weapons sinking deep before they pull wetly from flesh rings over the ravenous groans of the disfigured dead.

Then splashing, the crack of wood, and a crash.

She doesn't look, too busy trying to pry her pocket knife free from another corpse, but the slime around it compromises her grip and it slips away as the thing falls back. She leans back away from grasping hands, lamenting its loss as she grabs a can in between heartbeats.

"We have to get Gabriel," says a familiar voice beside her.

"What happened!?"

"I don't know. We'll push down the shelves on the ones here and fight through the rest."

Maly casts a baleful look at her can, trying to formulate a response.

They move faster than her. It takes them fractions of a moment to heave the racks forward onto the cadavers, and then they are struggling with the small wave that remains. It occurs to Maly that she very well may die here.

Pale, waterlogged fingers grasp her arm, and there is no time to think. She struggles, jerking her elbow up as the hand tightens, and bashes the can into the things head. It still pushes on, jaws open and noxious smell rolling from it, and she does it again, then again. She feels the can in her hand dent and warp as she keeps going, striking it until the head cracks open and rancid gray matter coats her fingers alongside what looks like corn.

The body crumples, and she checked the split aluminum. It's definitely corn, and it's floating all around them as she catches her breath.

Maly looks up, and the rest of the dead seem to have fallen. Gabriel is hyperventilating, his arms draped around the wall for support like a mockery of christ, his terrified eyes glued to Rick.

For a moment it seems like it's over, but then there's shouting and splashing again.

"BOB!"

Maly whirls. Before she can even take a step Bob is wrestling free from the dead things grasp, and the woman who had the scoped rifle is caving its head in with a recycling bin.

She turns back, the commotion over. She's soaked in slime and aching, still captive, and weaponless again, but there is work to be done.

She drops the can and starts searching for the body that cost her a knife.

She doesn't find it, and in her search doesn't notice the considering looks thrown her way.

* * *

It's a good haul. A big one, large enough that it could have fed Maly for months if she subsidized it the way she usually does, weeks if she fed the dogs enough to get them up to weight. Three carts in all, each stacked with bins full of goods.

She worked for this, paid with labor and grit, fighting and loading. It cost her a knife, several bruises, and being dry and only fairly ripe.

Maly isn't sure if she will get any of that haul.

The walk back to the church saps what feels like the last of her energy, but the relentless sun means she goes from soaked to only damp. Around her people noises pollute the quiet, soft murmuring of conversation and wet footsteps not her own, the hard click of fingernails against a gun, and the rustling of clothes. It's muted, tense. She can see the preacher walking on too straight legs, his whole body tense and dripping with guilt. She thinks the leader may have said something to him.

Honestly, she's surprised he's alive. He's nobody to them and he broke rank. They could have left him to die.

Maly doesn't have it in her to consider why the fuck they didn't, or why he keeps looking at her.

So she places one soggy boot in front of the other until she's marching her way up the church steps, somewhere in the middle of the food train that is met with sounds of appreciation and scattered claps. Everyone in the building looks relieved, anticipatory, and hungry.

She herself manages to make it to a corner while congratulations are given out, and sinks against the dovetailing walls. She notices that the people who went on the raid note her positioning but otherwise allow her to rest as they speak.

She leans back and catches her breath, nauseous as hell.

Eventually, her guard walks over, steps precise and movement lithe. The woman's face has been cleaned off, her dark skin free of the slime that had dried into a cracking film.

"You need to drink."

As usual, it takes a second to sort the sounds. During her moment a bottle is pushed towards her, familiar in shape. It's her own, taken from her pack.

"Hydrate, or that concussion only gonna get worse."

She takes it warily, her eyes glued to the woman the whole time. Michonne doesn't move from her place, nor does she stop looming until Maly has taken a sip of warm, metal tasting water.

"I saw what you did."

Considering Maly has no idea what she is referring to, the words mean nothing to her even after they unjumble. All she knows is that the woman seems to be weighing her, measuring something that Maly can't name.

"You took a walker out when it reached for Rick. And another with a can."

There's a point there that Maly can barely see the woman trying to make. A hint, or a clue. Maybe a question that was implied instead of implicitly stated. She weighs her words in her head, stating them at a snail's pace to make sure they come out correctly.

"I did."

Michonne looks down as if waiting for more.

Maly has nothing left to say.

Still curiously watching her, the woman leaves. She returns back a short while later with a perfumed wet wipe and a simple "You reek."

And that's it.

Maly holds the wipe in her hand, a soft powdery smell emanating from the thin cloth. She figures it must be a pretty offensive stink that surrounds her, but seeing as it is in her clothes -as it is in everyone else's who went on the raid- a wet wipe is going to do almost nothing at all.

She wipes it over her face anyway before dragging it across her hands, then scrubbing at her messy, cropped off hair. By then it's already stained, but she makes sure to get every spot she can before it turns black completely.

She balls it up and stuffs it in her pocket when she's done, taking another sip of water, watching.

There are too many people milling about, helping here and there as they whittle open cans and prepare a feast. It's a waste in her eyes, gorging when they are unsure where or when more might be available, but it's a concept she understands. The dogs do it, and to some extent she did it she found the school.

None of them go unarmed, though.

She's monitored constantly, but besides having to relieve herself once, Maly never moves. She knows if she tries to bolt she will be taken again, if not shot outright. They have every advantage, and she has none.

She waits.

* * *

Others come back. A young Korean man and a smart looking woman, accompanied by someone smaller but capable looking. They head for their leader and speak in quiet tones for a few moments, showing the silencers they must have found.

Devil eyes glance at her as they speak, but Maly can't say why.

Squirrel Killer returns with the grey-haired woman she saw earlier. She reminds Maly of the most dangerous kind of water; inviting on the surface with terrible currents running beneath. Ironic that water seems to be what they are carrying. That, and dead animals. She notices a few gut-hooked bluegill from a trot line and a rabbit with a wire still wrapped around its neck, the back half tore off. She knows the bite pattern around the fur, and frankly, she's surprised the whole thing isn't gone.

A brief flash of resentment flows through her at the thought of them eating her meager catch when they have so much of their own.

She swallows it down.

The newcomers also go to the man in charge. There is more talking, the shaking of a collection of said expired animals, and the production of a punji from a pocket. This warrants another glance, and not just from the man who tackled her, but the surrounding group as well.

Not that it means anything, because they don't tell her anything her before breaking up.

She watches with resigned anger as her catch is cleaned and gutted, her eyes on the bucket of scraps. They toss things she would usually keep, making it larger than even normal, especially combined with the bits from the squirrels before.

It would have been good for the meat-pack, but she is pretty certain these people do not give a fuck.

Eventually, the light through the window begins to wane, and light from the stained glass windows is not enough. Prayer candles are pulled out for heat and light, their vaguely perfumed scent making her nose itch. Thankfully the smell of food soon overpowers it; cooked meat and canned pasta, heated vegetables and savory soups. Enough to make her mouth into an ocean of saliva.

She drinks her water as they begin gathering together, piling the food on and feasting, knowing that saliva is all that she is gonna get.

Or, at least, she thought she knew.

Michonne breaks from the main group and heads her way, her face stoic and impassive, carrying what she assumes is her own plate of food with her. At first Maly supposes that her starring must have warranted a closer guard, and therefore is surprised when it is extended towards her.

She stares at for a moment before looking back up, face unreadable.

"Eat. It ain't poisoned," Michonne tells her.

Maly doesn't want to be the asshole who responds with ' _of course it wasn't, I watched you make it_ ' so she doesn't speak at all. Instead, she takes the plate carefully from the woman's grasp, wondering when the last time was she even had a plate to use. It doesn't really matter to her, but having one is something of a novelty after eating off of sticks or out of cans since this all began.

The food is warm and Maly does not know if or when she will get to eat again. She's surprised they were honorable enough to give her some in the first place, even though she earned it. It just doesn't fit the MO she has for people who steal your things and threaten your life.

She figures she's thinking about it too much and tucks in.

Which, apparently, gathers attention.

"Why she eating with her hand? You forget to grab her a spoon?"

Maly stops at the sound of the voice, peas pinched in her fingers, and looks up from her plate.

 _Ah._

Michonne answers the questioner slowly, raising the aforementioned tool and never once taking her eyes from Maly's.

"Didn't have the chance to offer it yet."

She considers it briefly, but decides that she has no need for a spoon. She's been using her hands this long, following the tradition of a thousand cultures before her. Utensils are extra, frivolous, and also her hands are already in the food.

Michonne watches silently before lowering the unused utensil in acceptance.

Silence reigns between them once more, and it is a strange one. Even though there are no words spoken between her guard and her, there are many being thrown about among the gathered. Too many.

It is an extravagant amount, Maly thinks. Far more words than what is needed.

As if to punctuate her thoughts, the giant of a man she saw earlier stands, clinking his glass to propose a toast. She tries to focus on her meal, but the man's voice is booming, and her temple throbs in time with it. His sheer volume demands her attention, and her thoughts hungrily focus on his speech, untangling it against her will.

"I look around this room," the redhead states. "And I see survivors. Each and every one of you has earned that title. To the survivors!"

Congrats, Maly thinks a touch bitterly as they cheer.

"That all you wanna be? Wake up in the morning, forage for food, fight the undead pricks, go to sleep at night with two eyes open? Rinse and repeat. Because you can do that. You have the strength. The skills."

Maly pauses, hand halfway to her mouth.

"Thing is, for you people? That's just surrender. Now, we get Eugene to Washington and the dead will die and the living will have this world again. And that is not a bad takeaway for a little road trip."

She looks over, searching the man for his conviction. He's not looking her way, no one is, not even her guard. He has their focus in a vice grip, and he's not about to let go.

"Eugene, what's in DC?"

Maly is momentarily appalled that it must be asked.

"Infrastructure constructed to withstand pandemics of this FUBAR magnitude. That means food, fuel, refuge. Restart."

There's no sight of the speaker from her corner, but she can hear them, and she cannot comprehend the sheer fucking vagueness of that description. Like mist or smoke, only even less defined.

"However long this plays out, how long it takes for this reset button to kick in, you can be safe there," Red continues. "Come with us. Save the world for that little one. Save it for yourselves. Save it for the people out there who don't got nothin left to do 'cept for survive."

Silence for a drawn moment, only broken by the gurgling of a baby.

"You here that? I think she knows what I'm gonna say," says Rick. "She's in, and if she's in then I'm in."

More applause, and Maly turns to her food again thinking that there are many things people do to keep hope alive, including self-delusion. It is not a condemnation on her part, but an objective fact.

She finishes her food without speaking. She wants to say that how they are living now is not so different than how many countries were before the dead began to rise. Scraping by like she is is not a product of a bygone age, will never be something that should be forgotten. If there's anything Maly has learned by being alone for so long and surviving by the barest essentials, it is this; The desire to have more than needed is a natural urge and a path to suffering.

This group has more weapons, more safety, more everything than what she had, and still they want more. They want it so much they took what Maly had and threatened her into compliance. They take and take and take, and they will never be satisfied.

Does Maly miss what she had? Fuck yes. Does she miss junk food and not busting ass all day? You can bet your ass. Would she willingly embark on a long, dangerous journey without skills or supplies under the fantasy of getting it back?

No. That's stupid.

It must show on her face, or else her solemn countenance must appear doubtful to her guard.

"You're skeptical," Michonne tells her without heat.

"The world is what it is," Maly states eventually. "That is not a bad thing."

"The dead eating the living, people eatin' each other, starvation, gangs, murder, sickness, chaos- that's not a bad thing?" she demands.

Maly stares up, unmoved. She thinks of her mother, and how she survived the genocide there. Thinks of all the wars and genocides in history, and how beside the dead rising, nothing else is really new.

"Those always existed," Maly says, enunciating with meticulously care. "Maybe just not to you."

Michonne looks like she's been struck.

Maly leans back against the wall, having said all she needed to.

* * *

 **AN:Can't decide whether she goes with Carol and Darl or stays with Rick and the group. Thoughts?**


	6. People

Her guard does not speak, and Maly is content to while away the hours of her wary watch in silence. She watches people come and go, noting the few that slip away and who joins with who. The sharp tang of wine wafts in the air, and most begin to settle in their place for the night.

Hushed tones overtake rushed conversation, and the church door opens and closes. The pounding in her head becomes a dull ache and her nausea fades into a sense of distant unease. A tiredness hangs in her head, but she does not think she will sleep tonight. It is not just the hard ground beneath her, so unlike the safety of her suspended hammock, but the fact that danger doesn't lurk here as much as it looms.

She will give the group this; she has not been violated, has not been tortured or mangled. So far they have not bound her nor have they maimed her.

They stole her things; she was attacked and captured. She was coerced into working and playing guide. In her opinion they are wasteful and loud, not to mention they are lying to themselves and chasing a fantasy, but Father Gabriel seems content to appease them, interacted and talked with them. He was scared but social enough.

They have not treated her with the vileness she bore witness to. She was given food and water, and she believes that had she wanted to pace the area, they may have let her.

This group, for all its faults, is not purposefully malevolent. It is hardened, but the people within are bound to each other. They work well and the large majority seems peaceable with one another, not enforcing ranks with dire threats and harm. A band of friends, if not family, holding on to a civilized aspects Maly no longer has.

If she's right, her damning sin was that she wasn't part of this group and that she posed a threat to them in some way. They did not know her, could not tell if she was a scout or an agent for a larger gang. She gets that now.

Maybe it is morbid, and perhaps it is the head injury talking, but she takes comfort in the fact that the largest threat they have given her is death. Not slavery, not torture. Just death and she accepted that she would die someday before this all began.

Maly closes her eyes. Not to sleep, but just to rest.

And not thirty minutes later, sound rends the air.

Shouting and snarling. The sounds of canines and people struggling against one another coming from right outside the church.

She opens her eyes and several things in rapid succession, going so fast that Maly can hardly tell which order they occur in.

She is hauled to her up by the collar of her jacket, her feet lifted from the ground. For a moment she catches a look of surprise at her weight by Michonne, who has made her stand to presumably deal with the meat-pack.

Almost simultaneously the church door opens and the noise outside goes from muffled to clear. Eyes peek outside and suddenly there's shouting all over the damn place. A cry of "Bob!", "Terminus!", and "GODDAMN DOG!" seem to arise all at once with no semblance of a sequence. It happens so quickly her brain only sorts them out later.

At once the population of the room seems to ready their weapons, and there's too much going on, too many people, too much action. She cannot note every surge of movement and change of placements in the few seconds this is happening in. It's just not fucking possible.

Maly's head spins slightly as she tries to orient herself and make a plan, but the spike of adrenaline that courses through her when a round goes off clears the everything from her head, useful and not. Ringing fills the spot where thought may have once been, the backwash noise of a gun going off in a cathedral.

The dog sounds disappear, spooked by the shot. Somebody scrambles from a crouch out the church doors into the night, covered by more armed people at the front windows and the open door. A moment later, two more rush out after the first.

And they come back, one woman supporting a limping figure, two men dragging a body that struggles weakly. She does not recognize the form as anybody from the group and only has a moment to even try and observe it before there is a face in hers, expression cold as it searches her.

Maly blinks back, and whatever Michonne finds there is enough to warrant dragging her over towards where Rick stands, caught between one bleeding figure and another.

With no warning what so ever she finds herself placed between two equally forceful people in the midst of a tense group with guns, confused to all hell.

"Are you with him?" Demands the leader, gesturing sharply towards the man with a hole in his chest.

Her reply doesn't come fast enough, and he takes her arm to force her to look at him. There's fire in his eyes that wasn't there the first time, a sort of underlying hatred and promise of destruction.

"Was this your plan? To stall so the rest of them could attack and you could all eat us?"

Maly searches him. He's not lying. He's not even remotely exaggerating. He knows what he knows, and what that means is the man bleeding out on the ground is a cannibal, most likely from a group of cannibals. It's written out on Rick's face; a conviction, an undeniable truth.

"No," Maly manages forcefully. No, she hasn't eaten people. That's stupid. The diseases that she could get, the danger of gathering such a source, the immorality of it- it's damn lunacy.

She can feel everyone in the room searching her for a hint of something that might say otherwise, some slight give that may tell them she is hiding something.

They find none and turn on the only other unknown to them. The one even Maly knows is keeping secrets.

Father Gabriel quails under the combined weight of everyone's tense stares.

"I- I...surely you don't think-"

"Two of our people are missing," hisses the woman with the scoped rifle, which is news to Maly. "We were just attacked. She has gear, supplies, and all the evidence points to her being able to take care of herself. She wanted to run. But you-"

"I don't...I don't have anything to do with this-"

"You lead us here. Why are we here?"

The silence is heavy, and Maly remains still. Their logic is flawed because he was coerced into bringing them, but she knows they don't care. They are tense, flighty, and searching for a scapegoat. She understands that, but she also understands that there is nothing she can do to point that out to them right now.

"The walker in the food bank. You knew her. The scratches outside the church, 'You'll burn for this', that was for you. What's that mean, Gabriel?" Rick demands. "What are you gonna burn for?"

The priest sweats heavily, shaking and close to tears.

"What did you do?"

Gabriel shakes his head in denial, lips pursed and frantic. He's soft, Maly knew this, always knew that he was a coward and a pacifist, but it never affected her. It still doesn't. She didn't need a story from him, not like these people do.

"WHAT DID YOU DO!?" Rick roars.

"I lock the doors at night," Gabriel blurts, and but he's not looking at Rick when he says it, but Maly. As if she is the one with power over him, the person he needs to convince. "I always...I always lock the doors at night."

Maly holds his gaze, unsure why he is confessing to her instead of all the people with guns.

"They started coming, my congregation. Atlanta was burned the night before and they were scared. They were looking for a safe place," he pleads, and his lip wobbles and he finally breaks his gaze, looking around, trying to make everyone understand. "It was early, so early. The doors were still locked."

"There were so many, and they were trying to pry at the shutters. They were screaming for me, and so... the dead came for them," he chokes out. Genuine tears slip down his face. "Women. Children. Entire families calling my name as they were t-torn apart. B-begging me for mercy and d-damning me to hell."

He draws a shuddering breath, weeping.

"I buried their bones. Buried them all. I'm damned, I deserve to be damned, but," he finds her gaze again. "But you came, like the Baptist John out of the wilderness, and I thought, I thought-"

Maly genuinely does not know what he thought. Or what anybody is thinking.

"-But I know now. The lord sent you to punish me," Gabriel says to the group, sliding down to a crouch, crying freely. "I-I am damned. I w-was always damned. I alw-ways lock the doors-"

The priest sobs and Maly does not know what to do. People have never been her best subject and though she now knows how far his cowardice has taken him, it changes nothing for her. He was the only person she heard in over a year, the only person she saw. It wasn't -and isn't- a strong relationship. It was just the only one she had.

Nothing about that shifts.

Around her, the world continues. There's a dying cannibal on the ground and an injured member of the group seated on the pew, both dog bit, and bleeding. Apparently, two people are gone, there is a possibility of more attacks, and Red looks like he's about to shit a brick. She is in danger, always in danger.

It's too much to shit. Too much action all at once, and not much she can do about any of it.

So she doesn't do jack.

Maly takes a seat in the pew beside the teenage boy. Besides a few measuring glances, nobody does anything to stop her.

She closes her eyes and thinks on what she always knew. People are gambles. They are dangerous. Look at what has happened before even a full day has passed.

Dogs, she thinks, were much simpler.

* * *

She wakes up to shuffling.

Her neck aches and her spine throbs, but she keeps still despite that. She never meant to sleep in the first place, but it seems her body had other ideas, overwhelmed and injured as it was. For a moment she considers regret, but she didn't make the choice to nod off. It just happened.

The shuffling stops and rustling fills her ears. It is a familiar sound, the fabric of a pack jostling about.

Carefully, Maly opens her eyes.

There is a moment of slight pain as light lances into her retinas, but it fades quickly and she is greeted with a rush of information. Rick is standing near her pew, her bag held in his hands, his expression hard to read.

Maly slowly raises her head, and just as slowly, the man stares at her as if he expects her to lunge forward and bite.

Still groggy, and very confused, she reaches out to take it from him. He moves it just out of reach, his steely eyes searching.

For a long moment, nothing is said.

"There are some things you should know," he says after the quiet. He looks like he hasn't slept all night, but that is just an idle observation on her part. She doesn't actually care.

"The man that attacked, he and a group of others followed us here. He admitted to coming to take one of ours. Would have succeeded, but Bob said one of the dogs attacked the man and him both. Without it, Bob wouldn't have the time he did."

Her brain works through that at a snail's pace. The first and obvious conclusion is that the group made the cannibal speak, probably through unkind means. The other is that Bob himself is probably no longer alive.

She nods to show she understands instead of trying for words.

"I get what this looks like to you. We attacked you. We took your things. You've been held under armed watch for just trying to run," he says, holding her gaze. She doesn't flinch from his steely stare. "I'm not sorry."

Maly did not expect him to be. Didn't expect anything like regret from any one of them. That's not the world they live in.

Slowly, he takes her pack and sets it beside her on the pew. She eyes it carefully before turning her sights back to him.

"No machete, I ain't stupid, but almost everything else is there. You got your dogs, and you got your bag. Stay or go, the only thing you have to know from here on is this; If you hurt me or mine, I will kill you."

Maly tilts her head. In her mind, she wonders if this is a trap, some sort of twisted game, but she doesn't think so. It's like she thought before, this group is not vile or evil, just hardened. They have not been gentle or kind with her, but they have given more than she thought they would. It has simply come to the point where there are too many problems arising, and they cannot afford the resources to keep her under constant lock and guard. If she goes, she will be written off. If she stays, it would be by her own choice.

"The cannibals," Maly says slowly. "How many are out there?"

Rick looks at her measuringly.

"The man said four more. They have the rest of our weapons, and they aren't picky about victims."

Maly weighs the options in her head consideringly. Possibly face a cannibal gang in the area mostly unarmed, or stay here.

"What will you do?"

His hard stare shifts ever so slightly into an intense focus as Maly drags her pack forward, weighing her words. She unzips the pockets as she thinks, checking the contents inside. She still has her snares and tampons, though she notices a box of them is gone. Likewise, her med-kit looks a bit lighter, but funnily enough, there is food inside her bag that wasn't there before. Restitution, perhaps, or kindness. She does not know, barely cares.

She takes one of the pen knives that remain and slips it into her pocket, then another down her shirt. It's not much, nothing against guns, but already she feels far more secure than she did before.

"We were told that there was a school nearby. Good base, close."

"Bad choice."

He raises a brow at her, perhaps the first non-threatening expression he has directed at her since this all began.

Maly doesn't verbally respond, simply pulling a stake from her bag and feeling the weight of it in her hand, the side of the reed smooth against her palm

"It's trapped," Rick states simply.

"More than anywhere else."

He nods, and Maly shoulders her bag, standing up. If nothing else she finally understands why the meat-pack remained nearby instead of retreating back.

"You leaving then?"

Maly shifts ever so slightly, facing the closed doors of the church. She can almost taste the summer heat and sweat on her tongue, but she doesn't want to stay inside any longer.

"You took my freedom. You concussed me. You forced me into a dangerous scavenging trip," Maly states slowly. "Your group is wasteful, coercive, and secular. You are stuck yearning for what was."

His expression is flat at her blunt honesty. They are not insults in her mind, just facts, things she picked up from just one day of watching and interacting.

"But," she says carefully. "You could have been worse."

His look is half surprised and half solemn understanding. The only thing they ever threatened is death, and compared to some things, it is not bad at all.

Maly makes her way to the door, knowing that there are dangers and risks involved with whatever she chooses. But she needs time, to test and to think.

They let her go.

* * *

It's not safe out here, not safe back there, but she feels better walking until the woods swallow her whole.

Meatsack greets her like he once did over a year ago, warily skittering up to her as if she never left in the first place. The sight of its bright amber eyes and pointed ears as it skitters out of the underbrush with a section of the meat-pack is soothing, and when it slinks up to her she reaches out her hand to sink her fingers into its fur.

"You are stupid, stupid food," she informs it quietly.

Meatsack does not respond save to lick her stiff, stinky pants as if to remind her that the reverse is true as well.

She makes her way to the stream down southeast from the church, ears pricked and eyes scanning. She figures that whatever happens here now, neither the group or possible cannibals will wander back the way they came just yet, and her safest bet is there.

Buzzing cicadas and the soft babbling of the water greets her instead of the sound of people. The morning sun rises in the sky, and nothing at all is certain but its journey across they sky as time ticks by.

Idly, Maly notes that she is measuring things in minutes and hours again instead of days, but it is a passing thought. More important is the way the water she fell in yesterday, and the risk of getting an infection she can't afford.

She finds a spot and strips and squats low, reaching her hands into the greenish water only a foot and a half deep at most. Her fingers close around gravelly mud, and Maly sets to using the abrasive substance to scrub at her skin and hair in lieu of actual soap, rinsing and repeating until she can only smell musky creek on her skin and not the fetid stink of the dead.

Washing clothes properly takes time and makes noise, not to mention that without machines it's hard fucking work. But needs must, and she drags what she wore into the water with her, finding a big enough rock under the surface to scrub them against. The leather jacket pains her to do, but she needed to find a new one anyway.

Last of all, with a care she did not use before, she washes her mother's krama, working the checkered fabric with her fingers and palms.

More of the meat-pack emerges as time passes, some fifteen dogs gathering about as she sets the clothes out to dry and gets to work. It's more than she's seen in awhile, but the fact means little to her other than a stable protein supply for hard times. Her thoughts are otherwise occupied, her hands filled with cedar twigs she uses to scrape along her hairy legs in order to ward off bugs. She listens and watches the whole while, aware of the area around her and the dangers that could lurk there.

No one comes after her.


	7. Gambling

Maly spends the night in a tree, as she has a hundred times before.

Overhead the moon is waning in the star filled sky, barely visible through thick oak leaves, but brighter than it has been since the dawn of the industrial age. There's no competing illumination -no light pollution at all- and she supposes she never really realized it was there until it was gone.

It is just her and the darkness, the hard edges of her bag digging into her head and the deceptively thin fabric of her hammock walled around her. Some whip-poor-whill trills on its namesake song, loud and uncaring of the affairs of the world around it.

She breathes deep, taking a lungful of clear, crisp air so unlike the stuffy humidity of the church. Everything here feels slower after being around people again, stiller. The minutes tick by in her head, and she still can't tell if she likes it. Can't figure if she wants time to blur into sunrises and sunsets again.

It's an awareness that had melted away, a sense that she hadn't noticed going. An abstract concept that had no use to her out here because she had nowhere to go and nowhere to be. She just was. Just is.

She closes her eyes, tired. It was hard, laboring to check what snares remained and scrounging like she had before. The fact that the heat of the day left her dizzy and sick feeling did not help in the least and made her stumble more than once. She clung to the deeper edges of the woods and the stream, made a meal from crayfish and what walnuts she could crack. Noted her codeine was gone, and half her NSAIDs.

It may have been easier to forage closer in where the underbrush was not so thick in her condition, but she stayed well away from the structures that might house people and places. Always was a lot of work living like this, always will be, but it ensured her safety. People can kill her in more ways than she can count.

But those people didn't.

She shifts slightly in her hammock, considering that fact.

It would have been efficient. Taking her out would have ensured that she couldn't be a threat any longer. She could not harm their members or turn against them if she was dead. They could have added all of her supplies to theirs, made a net gain.

Granted, they could have left her alone in the first place, but after they took her it would have been smarter to either keep her under lock and guard or end her for good. She knows where they are staying, how many of them there are. Maly could do any number of things. Maybe she can't kill them with pocket knives and tampons, but she could do damage with what little she has. They have seen the traps and the incident at the food bank. They should know that, if anything, Maly can do much with little.

It doesn't make sense. They know people are dangerous.

What they did was a gamble.

She breathes in through her nose as the whip-poor-whill trills loudly, bringing sound from her chest and throat. The low, solemn coo of a predatory owl reverberates past her lips and fills the night.

The little bird goes quiet, and yet Maly cannot sleep.

* * *

There's no damn reason for her to come back.

Maly knows that. She isn't a dumbass. She is completely capable of surviving on her own, of getting as far away as she possibly can while the groups are distracted taking each other out. It would make sense, and maybe she's missing her machete but she has gone farther with less and she knows more than she did when she began.

This group is broken and inefficient, living with their heads in a dream. They take when they need not; when they are capable enough of learning how to survive just as Maly did. Her ideals and theirs do not align, and there is no good justification for standing here.

But she is.

She's standing stock still at the edge of the treeline she disappeared into not a day ago, the meat-pack scattered around showing her how little she knows. They should not have come this close to the group, should not have lingered when she was inside the church she's staring at, should not have followed her when she ran to Father Gabriel and they smelt gunmetal and steel. Just because they could have done worse but didn't doesn't mean shit. She should not be here after what happened, after everything.

Should not this. Should not that.

Is.

Maly stares forward at the church, knowing very well that she can be seen from the inside. That was the point. Lurking and trying to stay hidden would have gotten her shot.

She waits.

Eventually, the church doors open. A figure walks out, just as dirty and dour as she recalls. Beside him is the woman who was her guard, strong arms cradling a rifle, a new sword across her back. Michonne looks at Maly like she understands; like she gets why she's here when Maly herself only knows that she is.

For a while, everyone simply looks at one another. Nothing is said or done, there is only watching.

"Thought you'd gone for good."

Maly does not reply to the man even after her brain untangles the words. It is not that she can't find the sounds, it's that she doesn't know what the hell to say.

Kindly enough they wait for a response, but when no reply comes they shift ever so slightly. It's a simple readjustment to the growing heat of the day, nothing more. Around them the world is alive with the sounds of nature, ever moving and always making some sort of noise.

"You gonna try something?"

That, at least, she can answer. Revenge takes time, effort, resources, and desire. She has none of those things to give.

"No."

"You wanna come closer so we don't have to make so much noise?"

Maly stares forward. She blinks slowly, keeping her eyes on them.

And takes a step forward.

Then another, and another.

Each footfall seems to stretch for a lifetime to her. She can feel every piece of gravel that she crushes beneath the soles of her boot, hear every blade of grass the breaks under her weight. She traveled hundreds of miles, slogged through riverlands, meadows, and mountains, but these few yards somehow have meaning that those thousands others did not.

 _'Keep going, Maly Smith_ ,' she hears her mother say, but she never said _where_ or _why_. She just said to go, so Maly moves until she is standing in front of the duo.

There's a moment where no one speaks. They assess one one another, taking in whatever new information they have gleamed, weighing it with what they knew. It's the changing of perspective and thoughts, the quiet re-evaluation.

Devil eyes glance down briefly at the wary mutt a few feet behind her heels, then scan around the area behind her where the more skittish dogs will stay. Maly notes that his stance is more open than it was. His hand does not linger by the gun strapped to his side, and his shoulders are not squared back.

He inhales briefly, thinking something through.

"The people in the area who attacked. They ain't a threat anymore."

This, she thinks, is another out. Another reason to leave. One group has already taken down the other, giving her more safety to go.

She stays.

"It's Maly, right?" Michonne asks.

She looks over, noting the taller woman's relaxed grip on her weapon. Still held close, but not at the ready.

"Yes."

"Why'd you come back, Maly?"

Maly wonders why herself. It doesn't make sense. There isn't a good, sound reason. All she can think of is one thing.

"Because," Maly states cautiously. "You let me go."

Michonne blinks, still looking like she knows something Maly doesn't, and she glances to her leader. Rick himself give Maly one last searching look before swiping his hand beneath his nose.

"Alright."

* * *

She doesn't go back inside the church, and they do not make her.

Instead, she paces the border between the parking lot and trees, picking through the greenery with keen eyes. Wild thorn bushes abound, from native roses to berryless raspberry shrubs, but there are plants here and there with broad leaves, tipped at the very end. She knows that given a year or some, they would have grown into something that could have sustained her for much longer. Planned on letting them grow until winter at least.

Now it seems inconsequential.

She takes them from their roots up. The only thing that cannot be eaten on it is the vines.

She gathers what could be called a bundle if one were feeling generous, but like spinach, the leaves shrivel down when cooked, and the purple blossoms wilt. Kudzu can be eaten raw, but it doesn't do not feel as filling, which seems to be the way of things.

The roots can be made any number of ways.

She walks to the stream, a section far closer than she went before, and washes the dirt from the plants. Takes enough time to place the stakes she has left in her pack in a fish trap. It will be nothing but minnows if she catches anything at all today.

She gathers what water she can carry and heads back again, settling herself on the tree line, back against a trunk and ass in the dirt as she works. The leaves get plucked first, set aside or picked off for something to chew on, then the flowers, then the roots.

But before she can even start the fire to boil the water, the church doors open again.

Maly zeros in on the figure striding towards her, solemn eyes locked with hers. No rifle this time, but she's still armed. The sword, knives, a machete.

Maly's machete.

The shorter woman eyes her carefully as she approaches, a plate in hand, her strides confident and pronounced. Some of the dogs skitter warily as she gets closer, coats fresh with a new layer of mud from the stream, eyes gleaming.

The other woman stops and eyes them back.

"Can you call them off?"

Maly looks to Meatsack, who stands not far away, and then further out to the rest of them. That's actually not something Maly can do. If she made a loud noise they might skitter around and back off some, but they would come back. They can smell the food.

She turns her head back to the woman, unfazed.

"No."

There is a tense silence.

"Lunch," Michonne states simply, holding up the plate. "For you."

Her eyes dart to the kudzu in her hands, then back. She has her lunch.

"And your machete."

That is something Maly cannot scrounge from the woods.

She stands slowly, laying the leafless vines in the dirt where she sat, never once taking her eyes off of her one-time guard. Each step is measured and drawn as she approaches, the leaves turning to gravel underfoot.

She reaches her hand out, nails caked with plant fiber and dirt. The paper plate settles neatly on her palm, freeing the other woman's hands to undo the belt strap of the blade.

"This food," Michonne says cooly. "Got it from the school when we went in after the cannibals. We found three of them camped around a stache."

Maly feels a pang of something, but it dies fast and only apathetic acceptance is left in its wake. It was there, now it's gone. Nothing she can fucking do.

"The fourth one was already dead in the hall outside the cafeteria. Ankle was twisted, and there were spikes through his chest."

Again with the subtle insinuations of things. It's like a crossword puzzle in her mind, trying to figure out what she's being told without having the words spoken. She mulls it over in her head as she grabs for the weapon, the sheath sun-warm as she takes it in her palm, the hilt still held lightly by Michonne.

When she looks up the stranger's gaze is measuring again, like she's trying to read Maly and can't quite make out the text, but she lets go of the machete.

Giving her this is another gamble, that she knows. Not a big one, because they have superior weapons and numbers, but a small bet they do not have to take. It is a stupid, wasteful risk on their part.

Maly takes the blade and the plate, slipping back to her seat in the dirt.

Michonne leaves her be, walking back into the church, and Maly considers the food on her plate before flinging some to the mangy dogs.

* * *

Father Gabriel watches her from the window.

Maly does not know what he thinks, has not known what anyone ever truly thought but herself, but in this case, it does not truly matter. What they had is still the same, and the only thing that has changed is the way he cannot seem to tear his eyes away as she runs metal across a sharpening stone, bringing back the edge that never seems to stay.

This way of life is not kind to sharp things, and maintenance is a constant thing, damn near every day. If it is not bones that dull her blade, then it is the stakes she cuts, or the vines, or the branches. There are a thousand and one things that dull the and nick the edges, from cordage to cleaning catches, and though stainless steel requires care, she gives thanks that it does not rust and wear at the rate other metals do.

Her hands ache as she glides the fine grit down the metal, again and again, her joints protesting the movements. She and discomfort are closer company than usual today, but there is nothing to be done for it, and like most days it simply makes a home in the back of her mind. A constant, dull sort of chronic pain like this is nothing compared to the first legs of her journey where her body struggled to adapt to the demands, but it is noticeable nonetheless.

She does not have to like it. It exists despite her thoughts on the matter if she has any at all.

Dirty hands lift the blade and she holds it up to check the edge, wiping away stray grains of the stone on her pants.

The priest, she thinks, has yet to learn that lesson.

She sheaths it by her hip and places the stone back inside her bag, casting a glance around at her surroundings. The wind is gentle, bringing no relief from the humidity and the heat. Inside her torn jacket she sweats, precious water flooding from her pores and slicking her skin as she notes the scattered placements of the meat-pack.

She turns on her heel and shoulders her pack, heading back to the stream. Meatsack makes a noise, soft and high, before following along with. It's not a protest, but an attention grabber that has the other dogs following along with her, tongues lolling as they pant. Their steps are her cadence as she goes, four feet shuffling for every two of hers, keeping them all at the same pace. Leaf litter shifts as they carry on, ears pricked and eyes keen.

The fish trap is empty -as she thought it would be- but Meatsack manages to snatch a frog from the bank, and Maly sets to looking for those instead. She picks her ways upward along the shore, half crouched as she wades, only catching three that the meat-pack do not get to first. They are not big things, curled up about the size of her fist, but they are enough.

She splits them open as she walks away from the stream, the snot-slick skin making her grip a little less sure as she travels. Her feet are steady as they take her where she wants to go, and she crams the frog corpses in her pocket for later, slapping the shepherd mutt that tries to nip through her jeans to get to them.

It crops up suddenly as it always does, little warning of existence evident through the lush greenery that grows on this side of it. It is simply trees and thick foliage until it is not, an overgrown walkway around the playground of the school taking place of the rougher terrain. The red brick is still obstinately standing, the windows dusty and coated with dried fluids from the death that once resided within, handprints and finger trails evident from even a distance. It's only as she gets closer that she notices the signs of something else. There are boot marks near the hole by the entrance, too big by far to be hers, and stamped out stalks of grass where she knows she did not tread.

She follows them inside where the turn to scuffs in the dust and grime where the tile shows through, the dirt that had settled there disturbed and displaced. She picks out all the different sizes -notes the way the weight settled more in the heels or toes for some- and trails them until she reaches the hallway outside the cafeteria.

The body there is crumpled awkwardly, one shoe twisted ever so slightly in a way that's just a little off. The tip of several sharpened river reeds juts out of the back of the flannel shirt they were wearing and thick, coagulated blood stains the floor around it. Most comes not from the punctures, but the wet stump at its shoulder, the flesh around it cleanly severed instead of torn.

Maly nudges it with her boot to make sure it will not attack, watching the leg she touched shift lifelessly. It's dead as dead can be.

She moves to start disassembling the trap so she can salvage parts for later.

Death, like her soreness, just is these days.

He just gambled and lost.

* * *

 **AN: Usually I don't interrupt these things, but since readers and reviewers on here got me to this point I wanna thank you and let you know I'm writing original stories at Alleycatpublications. com if you ever wanna check it out. Also, this chapter took forever to work out, thank you for all your support!**


	8. Outside Looking in

Michonne scans the treeline through the shutters, letting the quiet stillness of the church wash over her. With so many of the group gone or missing, the hushed atmosphere is more like a sickbed vigil than anything else. It's the feeling of waiting and dwindling hope, the kind of resolution that comes from too much death and no boon to break the shroud of grief.

Losing Bob was the final push from celebration to mourning, and the unsure status of Carol and Daryl adds to everything, missing without a trace for a day and a half now. Death can come in a second, between one breath and the next, and the longer they are gone the larger that possibility grows.

It's too much in too little time, a storm breaking over them all at once. Abraham took Maggie and Glenn alongside Rosita and Eugene for the first push towards Washington, and without everyone the cathedral feels too big, despite the fact that it really isn't large at all. The violence of Terminus is still fresh, barely stopped bleeding, and at this point, it seems like the only thing keeping her going is her own iron will and the people around her.

Before, before there might have been more. She's no fool, but even she could not help but grasp at the tiny spark of hope Eugene offered. A chance of eliminating the dead, the prospect of not living in anticipation of attack or death every hour of the day. A slim possibility of bringing the world back to what it was.

But then she looked into the impassive face of a dirty stranger who told her that the world was always this way, her cracked lips stating an objective fact without malice or heat, and Michonne felt that dream begin to dissipate like smoke.

It hurts a little, she will not lie, but so does seeing the sun after spending a few hours in darkness. It's the pain of readjustment, a slight thing that pricks and itches only a little bit, and there is no time to linger on it. Maybe that dream is too far off, but there are other ones. Simple dreams of a safe place for the group, and maybe mouthwash or toothpaste so she doesn't have to taste her own bad breath constantly.

She licks her teeth under her lips and shifts spots, peering out another window to see what she can see. A set of footsteps treads a familiar rhythm against the floorboards behind her, and she knows who it is even before he speaks.

"Sun's down."

Michonne turns glances at Rick from the corner of her eyes. The man looks worn out, running off a few hours of sleep and days worth of adrenaline. It hasn't been easy for any of them these past few weeks, but him especially. There's a responsibility on his shoulders, a weight that he must bare. They have tried other ways, other systems, but the group knows what she knows. He is their leader, and that is what works the best. But the hits they have taken seem to strike him more than anyone else because of this.

"Daryl and Carol will show back up," she assures him.

"And the other one?"

Clear blue eyes glance her way, and Michonne slowly turns her gaze back to the trees, noting the spot the other woman periodically sat throughout the day. Working, always working.

"I told her she could stay in the church."

"Took it she didn't take us up on the offer."

"She ain't here now."

Rick looks out through the window next to her, a hand rising to settle by his hip. A beat of companionable silence stretches between them for a moment as they watch, ever aware and ready.

"Asked Gabriel about her," He states after a moment.

Michonne glances over, raising a single brow. It's a fairly recognizable expression, a universal face that seems to silently query 'And?'

"Says she came after about eleven months. Just showed up with the dogs, even dirtier than she was now. Boots falling apart like she'd walked a good long while, pants covered in mud, not saying a word. Said he never heard her say as much as she did to us."

She purses her lips and drums her finger on her pant leg in thought. Rick is dropping a lot of clues, and there's more from what Michonne has seen. The girl somewhere outside is thin, almost painfully so, short hair choppy and full of split ends. Even after a wash she looked like some ragged thing, off-putting and unclean. But more than anything she is quiet. Michonne herself isn't much of a speaker, but it goes deeper than that in Maly. It's like it takes her a while to sort out what's being said and what sounds to make in response. Almost as if she hasn't needed to for a long while and the words withered away.

"There was no one to kill," Rick says.

She listens, waiting for him to elaborate on that statement a bit more.

"That was her answer to the third question. Because there was no one there."

A frown overtakes her face. The appearance, the pack, the shoes, the time frame, and the skill set. How she shied away from the group even inside the church, tucking herself into a corner and only moving when forcibly moved. The way she went not to the direction of town when she left, but away from it, deeper into the woods. It's just confirming what she already suspected.

Eleven months and change away from everything, from everyone.

Isolated.

Michonne thinks of how it was for it after everything was taken from her, how she lost herself and walked the hard, barren earth like one of the roaming dead. Those months she spent out there weren't living, they were-

-She doesn't know what they were. What she was.

No, she knows.

There was nothing left but breathing and moving, prying each day of life out of unforgiving fingers. She just kept moving and being, her feet shifting mechanically beneath her and her eyes always watching. No ties to keep her steady, nothing to turn to or hold. She just was, nothing more than that.

Michonne recognizes the look Maly wears, or a shade of it. It's one she saw in still waters and abandoned house mirrors not so long ago, just going because there was nothing else left.

That girl has spent too long out there, no Andrea to ease her back in like with Michonne. Instead of another capable survivor, she found a scared priest dripping with guilt and so burdened with his own dilemma he could not consider hers.

"She's scouting us," Michonne states coolly.

Rick shifts thoughtfully, glancing at her.

"Don't think she knows why, Rick, but that's what she's doing. Watching us to see how we run things, see if it's safe."

"And you think we should let her."

"I think she is starved for human company, with no one out there with her and only a jittery priest to take care of. I think if she can keep both of them and the dogs at least somewhat fed than she has got skill. I think that thinning the town was impressive, and the traps in the school even more so."

Rick takes her in, assessing, and Michonne gets the feeling she always gets when Rick looks at someone like that. That he's both seeing what's in front of him physically and staring into the person themselves on a deeper level.

"She's been out there for a long time, Michonne. No groups, no people to work with. Just her, her own rules, and dogs."

"And I had two walkers on chains," Michonne responds. "But your group took me in. Brought me back."

Movement outside catches her eye, tree branches shifting in a way that definitely is not wind. She shifts her attention away from the conversation and peers out, her body tensing slightly as she squints through the darkness to see. She feels more than sees Rick do the same, following her lead.

A figure slips through the treeline, tall and familiar, followed by another. One of them is definitely Daryl, but any relief she feels is mitigated by the fact that the person by his side is assuredly not the woman he left with, but a boy she does not know.

* * *

 **AN: So, updates on this are gonna be more sporadic because I have an increased workload from various sectors and since this is something that is supposed to be fun for me, I'm not going to force it.**


	9. Same as Ever, But Different (I)

Maly wakes with the sun.

She does as she always does, keeping her eye closed as she listens to the world around her. Her pulse is steady and constant in her body, a beat that thrums through her as the birds chatter in the trees. Robins and chickadees trill and chatter; the breeze rustles through leaves. Nothing is there to warn her of any danger.

She inhales deeply, smells the spicy scent of pines mixed with the musk of her own clothes and perspiration. The bag that rests beneath her head stinks faintly of something that doesn't have a name. An umami, almost fungi, and almost meat, brought on by all the times she stuffed kills inside and the fluids of the dead that rubbed off her clothes and onto it, mingling with the odor of sweat and dirt and dog.

Opening her eyes, she notes the bluish gray light of early morning dawn just melting into gold, and shifts in her hammock to crane her head above its nylon walls. Around her the foliage blocks most her view, but she brushes it aside until she can scan the forest floor. Her eyes pick through young trees, vines, brambles, and branches, but find nothing more than an occasional errant slumbering mutt.

No threats.

She gets to work.

By the time the sun is three fingers above the horizon, she's already moved through the motions that have kept her alive this long, checking the fish trap and the remaining snares for breakfast and gathering water and wood for boiling. In the world before, she had different chores to take care of on a daily basis, and they could be ignored if she so chose. Here and now, if she does not commit to her gathering she will die in a manner of days, likely less.

The slick, slippery bodies of the minnows in her hands are hard to clean as she walks, silver scales sloughing off onto her fingers and knife like smelly glitter. Though their bodies only span a few inches at most, there were a dozen or more trapped by the funnel mouth she formed from the stakes. There may have been more had a watersnake not happened upon them, but Maly happened upon it and the circle of life went on. Shad or serpent, she will eat.

Working slowly, she presses the edge of her knife into their soft bellies, slitting between hair-fine bones until tiny tubes and earth-toned organs spill over the edges of her nails. Her steps are steady as she scrapes them out, attention partially on the job of gutting and partially on her surroundings. She is aware, always aware, of the world around her. She must be, even when her destination is set.

Slowly the church comes into view, and she sees a flash through the shutters to know that a watcher is still on duty in these early hours. It's not much, hardly a shifting shadow against the scratched and pitted screens that block most her view, but it is enough to know.

Maly keeps that fact in the back of her mind as she seats herself in the shaded area from before, a Dakota pit dug into the earth already. She cocks her head at it as Meatsack snuffles at its edges, head low and nose drawing short bursts. The mangy dog eyes her warily, muzzle painted with filth and flecked with bits of red from whatever it ate the night before.

She shoos it away, already laying down her pack and stowing her catch. She'll clean the snake later, she supposes as she sets to make a feather stick to get the cooking fire started.

Making a fire is a tenant of survival and this world, and making one hot enough to cook on used to be an exercise in frustrating trial and error. By now it is rote, her body moving through the motions without much thought. Start with tinder -birch bark, wood shavings, dry trash scraps- and then small twigs. Work up in size and thickness, making sure the wood is not rotted, moist, or green. Pines burn smoky and quick, hardwoods for longer and hotter.

Boil the water in old tin cans, a little at a time. Skewer the shad on sharpened stakes of young green wood that isn't pine -which makes any meal taste of acidic sap- and leave said sticks standing upright in the dirt for cooking later.

She watches those fish as she pulls the limp, jiggling body of the snake in her hands. The dogs inch closer, just as hungry as she is, and half the work she does is to kick them away while she works the smooth, scaly skin off the pink flesh of the snake. After a careful beheading, she digs her short nails into the seam of dermis and meat, workng a flap free until she can pull it down like sock from a foot.

By the time the first two cans of water have boiled and the bony flesh is bared, the church doors open. Maly watches warily as more than one person begins to emerge, carefully tending her meal as they eye her back. The teenage boy and his father seem to be setting to work with Michonne, the woman with the sniper rifle on guard and the man with the beanie stretching.

Carefully, she pours cooled water into her bottle as they set to what looks like fortifying the church. Her grimy hands set her meat over the mouth of the pit to cook, and she sips her drink slowly as more emerge.

She notes a newcomer walking about, his odd gait indicating trouble walking, but his grim, tired face gives no hint of new pain. An old injury on a young boy, healed enough for him to become used to its presence and adapt. Distantly, she ponders where he came from before Squirrel Killer emerges, worn but determined, and supposes the missing members came back plus one.

Yet she does not see the woman who is dangerous water. Nor does she note Red or the man with the mullet who spoke of vague fantasies. Also missing are the Korean and the group that found the silencers, and the woman with long hair and a cap.

It has been only a few days since she met them. She wonders apathetically if she watches long enough if they will all disappear.

Maly knows it would matter little either way.

Still, she watches them board windows as the shad roasts, blinking sweat from her eyes. Meatsack approaches her, head low and gaze fixed on the people working, and she barely pays the mangy thing any mind until it comes a little too close to the boney snake meat to be doing anything innocent. A nudge from her booted foot provokes a growl, and she huffs before swiping at its muzzle with a closed fist to send it dancing back.

In a move that's part testing, part playful, and part serious, it lunges and snaps at her. She jerks out of the range of its teeth and readies her hand to grab it by the scruff, wary of the other dogs joining in around them, but before she can grab it a shout jolts her attention.

"Hey!"

She lurches, unused to abrupt sound. Meatsack presses the advantage, nimble quick as is manages to catch a sleeve in its teeth and she reflexively lashes out to punch it in the side of its head. It yelps as the blow connects, skittering away, and Maly stares at it as it scampers with its tail between its legs.

Thudding footsteps sound from the direction of the church, and when she turns to face it she finds three figures closing fast. A knee jerk reaction inside her has her wanting to follow Meatsack and flee, but she quells it down easily, blinking as they approach.

"Did it get you?"

Maly doesn't have time to respond before the teenage boy is stepping a little too close for comfort, his father and Michonne following behind. She stretches back and away from the entourage, feeling a little crowded by their presence. The two adults take note and still at the motion, and after a second the teen seems to sense it happening, glancing to his father to check before taking a step back himself.

There's a pause as Maly watches them look her over, eyes scraping over her jacket. A quick glance tells her that there are a few small punctures around the sleeve, but not anything more.

"No blood," the teen states as if they all could not see that for themselves.

"It was not trying for blood," Maly replies after a beat, shaping each syllable with care. If Meatsack wanted blood, it would have to be trying harder than that.

"Not trying for blood?" Michonne asks.

Maly stares impassively at her. She just stated that; it bore no repeating.

Rick himself simply evaluates the situation, his eyes glancing around from Maly's campfire to where Meatsack slunk away. She sees him working it out in his head, pieces slotting together and options being considered.

"That a regular behavior?" he asks eventually.

Maly inclines her chin in the smallest of nods.

"And you haven't considered killing it?"

She tilts her head ever so slightly to the side, the fabric of her mother's krama brushing against her neck. Meatsack's death has crossed her mind more than once, but not for the same reasons she believes Rick is thinking of.

Words roll through her head, and she sorts them out until she finds the best ones for her.

"It can do more living than dead."

The boy goes quiet at her statement, and Rick levels her a look she can't interpret before glancing at Michonne. The two of them hold a silent conversation with their eyes while Maly gazes back, wondering if her meaning was unclear and mildly wary as she bites off the rest of the minnow to eat. She chews the musky meat as she mulls over another way to say the same exact thing.

"Its life has more use than its death for now," she tries.

They glance over quietly, but this, at least, they seem to understand.

Maly tosses her empty kebab into the pit fire and grabs another, having said all that needed to be said, same as ever.


	10. Same as Ever, But Different (II)

Maly leaves after her breakfast, smothering the flames inside the pit with their own ashes, hoping the coals keep under the ashes for another fire. She peers one last time over the group, those partial strangers toiling under the sun. One of them is breaking the pipes from the organ and staking them within the earth around the church's front doors, and she wonders how the priest will feel about such things. Change is not easy, and his chapel was a static place that remained untouched by the events outside. It was a shrine to what was as much as it was a shelter for him.

Now the windows are barred with pew backrests, the door is warded with heavy spikes, and there is no going back. A physical shift that is undeniable; a continual reminder of the danger that exists for those that need it.

Maly shifts her pack onto her back, feels the weight of her machete at her hip, and ponders why people crave such constants.

She writes it off as useless almost as soon as it enters her mind. It's not a practical thought, not something she can solve, or even has the initiative to think too hard on.

As always, there are other things to be done. With the cannibals gone and the group having cleared more buildings than she was able to by herself, she can go back and scavenge what they missed.

A pair of nut colored eyes catch hers from the doorframe, a bald head peaking around the gleaming makeshift spikes dug into the dirt. She pauses just long enough to meet them steadily, unjudging and unchanged.

Father Gabriel remains inside his church, and Maly moves on.

She cannot spare much thought for the preacher. Cannot afford such a division of attention, not when she is going into a more urbanized area. Even a small town is dangerous, as everything always is when the dead roam the earth, as it was even before then.

The sounds of people continue on behind her, and she leaves them as easily as she did before. Still there is a lingering uncertainty about why she sought them in the first place, following an unknown feeling that is hard to place and harder to understand. Not something that she was ever taught, or something that can be learned. Deeper than that, a hazy thing written into her.

Instinct, maybe.

Dirt turns to gravel turns to grass and leaves, and Maly lets everything fade but awareness of the world around her. Her breaths are quiet draws of air, her feet machine like as they move, the pack heavy and solid on her back. She tastes the lean musk of charred snake meat on the back of her teeth and feels the heavy heat of the sun on her back.

A bully mix with a short snout and wiry hair pads to her left, panting in the heat, and behind it some terrier creature skitters after a grasshopper. Somewhere ahead, Meatsack slinks along as a scout, head low and ears pricked as it picks its way forward.

A breeze picks up, and as always, she smells the town before she sees it. A musk like mildew and rot, faint but definitely there. The first outlying building crops up, derelict and long since picked over by her.

Still, Maly treats it like it houses something, going the long way around to avoid any windows that might catch her. She does not know what could be hidden within, or who. Best, she knows, to be careful.

Half a mile past that, she hears her first groan. It's a weak, pitiful thing, more rasping sigh than beleaguered moan. She sees it in the distance, half withered away by time and decay. Its sex is indeterminable in this state, ribs jutting out past its sternum, poking into open air like reaching fingers. Its hungry mouth gapes at her, lips shrunken back and hair half missing from its head.

A rangy mutt whuffs at her softly, and she waits, listening for more. The dogs look to her, ears pricked as they do they same.

The bully mix moves on, and Maly does the same.

Their demeanor changes, heads dropping low and tails back as they move. Their faces shift and watch as the pace changes from a ranging trot to a purposeful stepping. Some noses lift to the air while some drop lower until they touch the ground, and Maly moves with the meat-pack, purposeful and wary as they reach the first set of her larger traps.

Out of the six clustered here, none are triggered. There are no dead to deal with or bodies to search, nothing but wood stakes and wires near a sunken pit in the ground.

She keeps going, blind to the unmoving remains of the ones she already cleaned from them all the times she checked before. The festering cadavers that litter her path to the town with split skulls are nothing to her, having taken all she need from them.

The disappearance of the soft give of the earth beneath her boots as grass turns to asphalt is noticeable, and she slips her thumb beneath the strap keeping her machete in her sheath, sacrificing walking speed and surety for the ability to draw at a moment's notice. She scans constantly as she walks, headed to a place she figures should be clear if the silencers were anything to go by.

The gun store is on main street, shattered windows grim and dirty, a decrepit sign hanging on chains overhead. The inside is dark, even during midday, the open door foreboding with its lack of light.

She wraps her krama around her nose to keep out dust and muffle some of the mold smell from inside, eyes narrowed as a canine snuffles around the edges of the gutter. She listens for a long, long moment, willing her eyes to see anything that might be amiss.

She finds nothing.

Carefully, she creeps forward, head low and chin tucked into her neck. A bead of sweat dribbles down her forehead as she slinks in, her eyes scanning.

Broken, empty shelves greet her. The cabinets are bare, display cases caved in. A torn rag rests at the edges of one, caught on a jagged shard of glass.

She leaves it be. She has no need for it.

Meticulously she combs the store over, well aware that what she seeks may be long gone. There are other ways to do what needs to be done, but this would be the most efficient. A scrap, not even a full holster or bag. Big enough to patch the hole that's been a weakness in her jacket.

No such luck. The store is barren, holding not even a speck of leather, nor any needle and thread.

She exits the way she came in, making her way toward the only thrift store in the area.

The cinderblock building is across on the other side of town, and instead of making her way through streets that still may contain the dead, she goes back the way she came to skirt the borders of it. Forever and always wary, she steps carefully, eating away the minutes for the sake of safety and stealth instead of charging her way through.

She ducks around the street corner, checking the exits before she enters the single story building. There are only two, a door in the fronts and one in the back, and without knowing any of the layout inside she is wary of such a set-up. The windows, she supposes, are also possible exits in times of need, but such wide windows are much harder to break through than people suspect.

She weighs her options, and decides she will seldom get a better chance than this.

Maly takes it.

Inside is almost untouched, save for a layer of thick, thick dust and a smell that gives away the inhabitants that must reside her. Thick and cloying, it is much different than the bloated rot of the food bank, but a decaying stench nonetheless. She goes on alert, watching and listening for the dead that may roam the building.

But the dead thing does not walk.

With cool eyes, Maly considers the corpse bound to a dresser barely any higher than kneeling height. She supposes it was an inventive way to go, strangling oneself to death by using one's own weight and bearing forward with a brace and makeshift rope. The end result, though, is a leashed cadaver with mummified hands that scrabble for purchase on the floor and find none.

She watches it for a moment, the stringy blond hair half fallen out to reveal a barren scalp, the softened flesh of its neck giving way as it strains to reach her. At one time, she thinks the woman may have been lovely, face flush and body plump. Maybe she had rosy cheeks and a cheerful smile.

Doesn't matter.

Maly hefts her machete in her hand, raises her arm back, and brings it down in a swing that twists her hips and throws the weight of her body behind the blow. She has to in order to make sure the blade sinks in deep enough.

The impact jars her fingers and wrist, but the body stills. Maly has to plant her boot on the things face and tug to get her blade free, but it is not the first time she has had to do so.

Her efforts are rewarded, though. Inside the thrift store, there are more than scraps of leather. There all whole jackets. She examines the musty things carefully, discarding a few as too soft to work as armor, and others too ornamented to work right. None, she knows, will fit, but some are stiff enough to withstand hard treatment and none of them carry the rot-stink of fetid corpse water that lingers on this one.

She changes then and there, testing the shoulders to see if they allow her to swing. It's baggy, but it will work. Pleased, she goes to put on her bag and move on, but color catches her eye.

For a moment, she simply stares at the item. She could use it but doesn't need it. Others could use it more but do not have it.

She slips over to the shelf and places the item in her pocket, noting that the ones on this jacket are a bit roomier than before, and goes to leave. It is the same as always, taking what she can use and moving on.

Maly does not consider that she only ever used to provide for the preacher, before.


	11. Same as Ever, But Different (III)

Maly is but one life on the planet, and that fact does not bother her.

There are a thousand things she will never know, and a million experiences she will never have. The world turns ever onward, a steady progression of eons and ages, and she cannot possibly be aware of everything that happens in one day.

She is not there to witness the walk Father Gabriel takes, creeping out of his church like a scared mouse. He will stroll through the desolate woods toward her school, hoping for something he can't name, tense and nervous as he takes in the abandoned building stained with the fluids of the dead, and she will remain ignorant to it. His own inner conflict will come to a crescendo inside those empty halls when he stumbles over a corpse missing an arm, then finds the limb in the kitchen, cooked and half-eaten.

His revelation will be one he comes to by himself, and in the place once used for teaching, he will learn.

Likewise, Maly will be busy scrounging when a group far away stumbles into the knowledge that there is no cure. That there was only a lie told by a man to inflate his value because he knew very well that others would deem him not worth saving if he told them the truth. She will be absent for the subsequent breakdown of those who left, their struggles, and the way they piece themselves together and come back.

Maly will not know of how they return to a church, find a trio inside, and share information between each other. How they whisper of a survivor from before, of another fundamental piece found in a faraway city, and frankly, she wouldn't care if she was there.

Nor would Maly have any feelings other than bewilderment about how those who returned leave once more, riding on rumor and hope to their people to a city packed with the dead.

In that city, life will go on. A group that left will try and gather members of a rival faction to ransom back for their own. They will succeed in gathering three, but loose one to his own struggles and a thoughtless execution.

She will never see what happens next, never live through the tense exchange in a hospital hallway. The trading of prisoners will go unknown to her, as will the elation of seeing missing member come back to them. She will not feel that titillating joy, that heavenly elation, that heart-swelling love.

Likewise, she will not feel the breathtaking sense of loss as they lose one of their own after just having got them back. That sorrow will never touch her, that pain will not linger, and she will not dream of the sound of echoing bullets for years to come.

Maly will not be there as the group takes a dead girl with them through streets full of corpses, or for the car ride filled with tears. She will not be privy to Rick's thoughts of the hostage that attacked and ran, about how they could have traded even and fair if he had spared a life. In his head, he will think of dogs and men and lives worth more living than dead.

Maly will go on not knowing about any of that, and it will affect nothing about her day.

That is until she returns to the church as the sun hangs a just a hand span above the horizon, and finds all those that had left gathered together once more.

She looks at them; downtrodden, disheartened, and soul sick as they gather on the steps of the chapel. She does not know what happened, does not particularly care.

Maly walks toward Michonne, who holds the baby tight on her hip, and takes the package of powdered Pedialyte she salvaged from the thrift store out of her pocket. She hands it over as others watch on, silent and lacking moral.

Devil blue eyes find hers, and she wonders what to do. What needs to be done, if anything at all.

She licks her lips, working out the sounds.

"Keep going."

Same as always, she thinks, but the first time she says them to anyone but herself.


	12. Grasshopper

The group, it seems, takes what Maly tells them to heart.

She leaves them be as the sun dips low in the sky, their expressions grim and bodies worn, and by the time she comes by at dawn the next morning, they have assembled a small group of cars and seem to be siphoning gas from the larger vehicles into them.

It occurs to her that they are leaving.

Something inside Maly twinges at the thought, her eyes half-lidded as she watches them work. Her fingers pick idly at the charred rabbit in her hands, the taste of the meat heavy on her tongue, a can of water already boiling away over the pit fire.

It's a remote feeling at best, distant and foggy in nature. Something almost like yearning and nostalgia for something that never was; a hurt that doesn't really hurt at all, too far away to matter.

It is what it is, she knows. Nothing more and nothing less.

The figures amble about idly, movement slow and weighted. She catches some -like Red and the woman like dangerous waters- going through movements efficiently and steadily, but others seem tired at best.

She does not know what happened, doesn't care to know. They will work through it eventually or they won't, it really doesn't pertain to her at all.

By the time she has her days water and has eaten her meal, more have come. She sees the teenage boy glance her way, followed by Michonne's unwavering gaze. For a moment they turn back, discussing something with the woman with a scoped rifle, but they break off to group with their leader, who catches Squirrel Killer's eyes. A whole lot of silent communication goes on as Maly smothers her campfire and examines the meat-pack.

In the end, it's not any of the people who watched her, but the young Korean man that approaches. He's quiet as he moves, and quick, coughing in the back of his throat several yards away to get her attention.

Maly pauses in her toil, looking toward him as Meatsack retreats a bit further away.

"Hey, uh," he greets awkwardly. "Maly, right?"

Maly nods just once.

"I'm Glenn, in case you didn't catch it."

She had not.

The man's gaze wavers for a second against hers, unsure. He doesn't fidget or shuffle, holding himself upright and confident, but his eyes flicker to Meatsack for a moment.

"We're meeting up in the church," he states.

Maly doesn't answer, unsure how this affects her even after she works the words out. She simply turns her head to the chapel before shifting to gaze at the woods again. There's work that needs to be done.

"Rick and Michonne -everybody, actually- was wondering if you would come?"

She stills herself. She knows they are leaving soon and is unsure why they would want her there. She doesn't see a purpose to it or a point.

Despite her misgivings, she nods to him, turning her feet from the woods onto the shifting gravel of the parking lot, hefting her bag up around her shoulders. One of the dogs keens lowly at her, but she brushes it away as Glenn flashes a bright grin at her before hurrying ahead.

She absently considers that smile as she trails after him, across the yard and up the cement steps, brushing it off as unimportant after only a brief thought.

The church doors are open, the boy with the hurt leg resting inside. He casts a distracted, forlorn glance at her before returning to stare blankly looking back at the wall. It's not the last one of them she receives as others funnel into the church, and some linger far longer than others.

Maly does not care.

She waits patiently as the others gather, the distinct smell of unwashed bodies filling her nose as they amass. Body odor, dust, grime, and the faint, lingering smell of the fetid remnants of the dead tickles her senses as Rick takes his place, as tired and soul-sick as the rest of them.

"A lot of you may be wondering what comes next," he begins. "After recent events…"

The leader trails off, his icy eyes trailing slowly to the side. For a time there is a heavy, lingering silence that seems to weigh on the group, one that leaves her untouched.

Rick breathes out, stands straighter, and stares them down as he overcomes his momentary lapse.

"Washington was a bust, but Noah says he came from a community up north. One with walls and good stores. At this point, it's as good a goal as any. If you have an issue with that, now is the time to speak up about it."

Another quiet follows, and nobody says anything. Maly still does not know why she was brought here, or why the meeting was called in the first place.

"Alright," Rick says at the implicit agreement. "Then we stay over one more night, get a fresh start in the morning. First car will be Noah, me, Michonne, Carl, and Gabriel. Second Car should be Abraham and his crew, along with Sasha and Tyreese. Figured the rear guard would Be Daryl and Carol, Maggie and Glenn along with Maly-"

There's a slow, dawning realization that takes over her as the words untangle themselves in her mind, a creeping epiphany that blooms like a flower in the sun.

They had assumed, Maly thinks, that she was leaving with them.

She must make some sort of noise because the others turn toward her and even Rick tapers off in his speech as if waiting for her to form her words.

Maly is stuck. She had not considered leaving at all, did not know that they had even counted her among them. It was just them, and it was what it was, but now it's not that at all.

She opens her mouth, trying to think of what sounds to make, but she closes it after she figures that she doesn't know what to think or feel, and as such, she cannot convey clearly what she means.

She ponders the dilemma, sorting it out before she tries again.

"I did not agree to leave," she enunciates slowly.

Something flickers in those devil blue eyes, a shadow that flits by almost too fast to follow. There is a bulge in Rick's cheek as he grits his teeth, and as she looks around the room there are several, equally curious reactions. The teenager looks like he's actually shocked to hear the news, mouth open ever so slightly, and Red looks like he's remembering something someone once said along those lines. Father Gabriel looks like he is a heartbeat away from hopeful, but Michonne appears to be trying to communicate something else entirely with her eyes alone. She's giving her that same knowing look, but edged and tired and asking something Maly can't name.

"You gonna stay?"

Maly considers the options in front of her. She weighs what she knows, what she has, and what she can do against the unknown for a time before speaking again.

"I have gear," she says, touching the pack on her back. "I have a food supply," she continues, gesturing toward the door and the dogs and forest outside.

Maly looks to the others, her face impassive and expression unmoved.

"Your supplies are low. Your gear is not for travel. You leave tomorrow. It is too fast."

There's a beat where no one speaks.

"Well, damn," Red says after a second.

Maly disregards the unnecessary statement, looking to Rick to measure his reaction. For a long minute he seems to weigh her words, searching them for something.

"We can fix that," he states.

* * *

It took approximately four months for Maly to begin scraping the inner buildings of town, and a little over half a year overall to get it as thinned as she had.

The group works quick, doing what would have taken her months in the span of a day.

In Maly's opinion, they are like locusts. It is not meant to a bad thing, despite the negative connotations. It is simply that, before they gather in mass, every locust is a singular grasshopper working way at plants a little at a time.

When they swarm, though, they are a devastating force of nature that can strip land in a matter of hours.

Armed with an achievable goal and organized, the group is like that. They pick things clean with a sort of wild efficiency, taking on buildings that Maly could have no hope of clearing as a lone survivor. While she breaks down her traps and gathers parts and pieces, they tackle stores she would have had to exhaust herself to work toward. While she survives for another day, the group obtains enough to exceed that time exponentially.

It's fast, she thinks. They are pushing themselves, as if there is a time limit to it all, instead of a yawning expanse of seconds and minutes and days that stretch on forever now that the previous establishment has fallen.

They go, come back, and there is more than there was. Packs and bottles, food they conjured from places Maly knows not.

Dispassionately she wonders if they understand that there is no push, no factors rushing them on, no races to win. She ponders they know their limits, if the group understands that they exist in the first place, and for reason.

Maly decides it is not her business and leaves it be, none the wiser to the haunted eyes that watch her absently greet the feral dogs hanging at the edge of the trees or the figure that slips away for a few scant hours.

She is, however, very aware of the truck that rumbles up later, hauling a horse trailer behind it.

It's a stout thing, if a tired one. The metal beneath the flaking paint is whole and unrusted, the welds still strong and sure. Likewise, the pickup towing it has seen better days but is largely in working order.

Squirrel killer steps from the vehicle as she watches from a distance, skin dirty and hair limp. He scans the assembled people, and to her surprise, does not immediately return to Rick. Instead, his squinted eye pause on her, little more than narrowed slits on his grim face.

Direction set, he makes his way over to the treeline.

Maly does nothing more than watch him as he approaches, noting that he seems to be more ragged than other members. There are bags beneath his eye that look more like bruises than anything else, and a sallowness to what little skin peeks out from beneath the grime.

He draws close enough for conversation, but for long, drawn while, nobody speaks.

"It'll fit the dogs," Squirrel Killer tells her.

Maly understands the words individually after a moment, but she struggles to grasp the context or actual meaning. She stares blankly at the man, and he waits patiently for her to speak.

"I do not understand.".

"You said you ain't leavin' because you got supplies and food here, and we ain't got any. We got more shit now, and you get a trailer to take yours with, too."

There's no response from Maly as she comprehends what the truck and trailer are for, and all the connotations of it. An extra car with limited cab space and towing weight is a drain on precious resources. It's something that the group does not need, but could cajole Maly into leaving.

It's an accommodation; an extension of effort, energy, and ability when things like those are precious commodities that are nearly depleted by simply surviving.

Squirrel Killer watches her patiently, and she takes him in before her eyes wander to the people working behind him. She lingers on their appearances, meets a few sets of eyes turned their way, and cannot help but think about gambles and dichotomies.

There's something to be said there, a comparison to the first group she saw and this one. Or rather, a contrast. At first, sitting up in that tree, those people near the city had seemed to be symbols of hope after a long time in the figurative darkness. It was only after a time she witnessed that it was not so.

Conversely, this group first appeared and Maly recalls the feeling of Rick's fist smashing into her face beside the sense of fear that lingered in her. Yet, here they stand after setting her free, waiting while she forms her words and understanding what will spurn her to go with them.

She looks to the dog behind her, then back to the trailer. It is still a fool's endeavor, chasing a dream of safety somewhere else instead of accepting what is. There are many flaws she could point out, things she would do differently, and attitudes that are entirely alien and wrong to her.

"Thank you."

Squirrel Killer grunts in response, and when she turns back to him he hefts his crossbow a little higher on his shoulders, turning to leave.

Maly watches the errant locust return to the swarm, and wonders if she is a grasshopper, waiting.


	13. Distance

The backroads they take to avoid the clogged highways seem to wind on forever, and with every bump and rattle, Maly stills herself a little further.

At first it had been novel, stepping inside the truck and sitting down on the worn seats. There was a knitted blanket thrown over passenger side to cover holes in the cracking leather and she had dragged her fingers across it mindlessly. It was an old comfort, upholstery and fabric, something she had no need for in the woods and hollows, and the texture was strange and alien to her now.

She hadn't actually sat in a car since this all began. Ransacked more than one, yes, but never sat.

There was a strange dissonance in her as she sat in the passenger seat and stared out the window as the others filed in, two instead of the original four. It was an odd sensation she couldn't name, an emotion she couldn't really place.

It lasted until Squirrel Killer started the engine and the car began to move. Then her mind stuttered and paused, feeling off-kilter as it lay still and yet somehow accelerated at the same time.

She had walked for so long, always operating under the power of her own body and nothing else. Seeing the scenery move past while not moving a muscle had been disconcerting.

Now she idly wishes the meat-pack would start making noise in the trailer again. Cramming fifteen mangy, feral dogs into such a cramped space hadn't been easy -a feat only achieved with time and bait- but the growls and snarls they had made as the gate closed and the cars moved were something to focus on. She knows very well a fight broke out among them at some point, the sounds of snapping and guttural whining close enough to bleed the distance between trailer and window, but currently they are quiet as the scenery whizzes by.

Now, there is nothing to distract her from her own poor reaction to being inside a vehicle.

Maly has nothing to focus on but the growing sensation of unease. The car has long since picked up speed, and everything blurs past at a pace she couldn't ever replicate on foot. They've eaten up more distance than she could in a week in just a few short hours, and it feels wrong.

The cab is too closed, too small when compared to the vastness she has surrounded herself with for so long, and the seatbelt feels like it's stealing her breath with its tightness. There's nothing but metal and fabric and plastic, and even the open window doesn't help. The hot air from outside rushes in the equally hot cabin, blasting her face with a ferocity nature rarely replicates, and all of it happens when she is unmoving.

She would do something to distract herself, but here in this car, there is nothing to do but sit and rest. There are no works that need completing; no labor to be done. No roaming, no foraging, no sharpening, nothing. It feels wasteful to her, all this time spent sitting, even though logic tells her it is not.

It is, she thinks as nausea crawls up her throat, unfortunate.

She can handle many other things. She found a basis of reason in them, even. There was an honesty in this new order, a sort of reality where one could not simply remove themselves from things they thought unpleasant. Some of those realizations came hard, cost something, but they held true to the individual. It was not easy to source food, to become intimate with a harder way of life, to know exactly what one's limitations and drives were. It was not simple to face a shambling corpse or understand that a shallow cut could kill.

It is not pleasant to learn that simply riding passenger in a car can make her sick to her stomach.

It is not an ego thing, she thinks. It's not the fact that something so mundane can have such an effect on her. Nor is it that it could be taken as a metaphor, a commonplace tool from before that has become foreign and illness-inducing to her after a short seventeen months in the wild. It isn't the fact that she discovered this through association with others, or that she shies away from truths about herself.

It's that she can do nothing about her situation.

Nothing soothes her frayed nerves or stops the feeling of everything being too close, moving far too fast. Her legs are cramping, sore muscles jarred as truck rolls over the crumbling roads, her morning meal sitting heavy in her stomach. The smell of body odor permeates the air inside the truck, heavy and offensive in her nose, and the seat against her back is an uncomfortable weight.

She breathes in carefully as the truck hits yet another bump, rattling her stiff body around in its seat. Bile crawls up her throat, and she knows she cannot afford to throw up. There isn't enough food to waste it like that.

It does not matter what she knows or how she feels, though.

The next section of washboard road, Maly feels the pressure and unease crescendo inside her and erupt passed her clenched mouth all over the dashboard in front of her. It splatters, wet and acidic and wasteful, all over the cheap plastic interior, and she can pick out the bits of frog she had this morning beside the masticated remains of a can of butter beans.

She blinks at it balefully, mouth still open and saliva dripping down her chin.

"Oh my God!" exclaims the woman.

Squirrel Killer brakes in surprise, and the relief fades away as Maly is clotheslined by her own seatbelt, jerking forward and almost ramming into the throw-up covered console in front of her. She hears the tires squeal for a heartbeat as they protest the sudden action, and a dog starts barking in surprise, setting off a chain reaction of anxious vocalizations that linger even as Squirrel Killer corrects himself and hits the gas again.

"Jesus!"

Squirrel Killer casts a glance at her, a bit wide-eyed and surprised, on hand stiff on the wheel. His lips are parted slightly, and he looks at her like he can't believe she did that.

"Maly," Says the woman of dangerous waters -and Maly knows now as she knew when the woman first chose the seat it is because it is easier to attack from behind- "Maly, are you alright?"

For her part, Maly simply stares at the dash, her lips tingling strangely and her teeth gritty. She does not feel alright in this car. She does not feel good that she wasted a precious meal.

"Maly?" The woman presses, and it's too soon, too fast. Maly can't get the words she wants out that quick.

"Give her a sec," Squirrel Killer reminds the woman, and Maly breathes again. Body odor mingles with bile now, and it is a terrible smell.

After the given moment, she still does not know what to say.

So she doesn't say anything.

Instead, she leans forward with her hand outstretched towards the lumpy liquid, intending to wipe as much as she can away. It stinks and having it permeate the hot, humid air is not helping her in any shape or form. Therefore, it has to go.

Squirrel Killer makes a sound she can't interpret, and behind her, the woman of dangerous waters makes another. Hers, at least, Maly can comprehend. It's a disgusted noise combined with shock.

Maly pauses, unsure.

"Don't touch it," the woman says, and even before the words sinks in she can recognize the appallment in that tone.

She doesn't make a face, doesn't move a muscle as her stomach roils and clenches inside her abdomen. She's too busy figuring out why she should not touch it. It is her own sick, and she is covered in grime and dirt already. Compared to the sour, rancid stink of dead blood this is nothing. There is no keeping clean anymore, so why?

"Here, jus', damn," Squirrel Killer mutters, and then he's taking a hand off the steering wheel to awkwardly reach in his back pocket, bracing himself on the leg that was depressing the clutch at an earlier time. After a moment of fishing around, he manages to grab hold of something and thrusts the item in her direction.

Maly registers proffered handkerchief slowly, at this point little more than a stained up rag that has seen better days. Threadbare and thin, she can feel the calluses of her fingertips through the material.

She knows it will do almost nothing to separate her from the liquid.

Still, she glances up and around at her temporary companions, and they watch her with some sort of anticipation in their eyes.

Ill and fatigued, Maly wipes the vomit from the dash with the bandana, and just like she thought, it doesn't protect her at all.

* * *

The caravan of vehicles stops with a scant few hours of sunlight left, and by now Maly has worn crescent-shaped bruises into her weathered palms from trying to still her body and mind.

She hurts. More than the lingering soreness that seems part and partial to her everyday life now, her joints aches and she thinks she can feel her bones.

Rest, ideally, is supposed to help. But the stillness of being inside the car for so long and fighting nausea has made that pain more pronounced. Her knees feel locked when she tries to shift them around, the gritty, stiff fabric of her pants rubbing against her skin making her even more aware of the bruises she has there from the day she first met the group. More than that, she can feel the shrinking goose-egg on her head throb, and her hands are stuck as gnarled claws.

She cannot take another moment. This is her limit.

She cracks the door ajar with her unmoving fingers, hooking the digits around the handle and pulling her whole arm back as she shifts her should forward against the window. The metal squeals slightly as she does so, and she winces at the noise as she stumbles onto the gravel beside the road.

"Maly, wait, where are you going'-"

Maly ignores it, taking a jerky step forward and only just remembering her bag. She needs to move her muscles, needs the ache inside her flesh to be worked away.

The short woman steps further and further away from the road until the thorns and grass of the field they parked beside swallows her up to her chest. She knows, just knows, there will be ticks to pick off her later, but she stopped caring ages ago.

She needs space.

They allow her this, and she stares at the distant treeline as the sunset paints the sky with periwinkle and mauve. Her mind is quiet as she flexes her hands until the claws melt into working fingers, her upset stomach fading the more her brain registers that she is outside the metal walls.

She is content to linger a while more, planning on heading to the trees for the night when she hears the grass shuffle behind her.

Maly turns, huffing in a short breath when the movement pulls the muscle of her back and neck. Rick is conversing with the woman in the truck, their eyes on her and Squirrel Killer as her makes his way over.

Maly blinks, looks toward the sky, and notes that navy has seeped in more than she thought it would have. She can see stars beginning to show.

She must have been standing here longer than she thought.

The rustling of grass catches her attention, and her gaze drifts back to Squirrel killer. He's closer now, close enough she can see him squinting at her through dust coated lids. His face doesn't telegraph much expressions wise, but there is still grief in the set of his shoulders and a weariness that clings to his breaths.

She still does not care.

"Hey," he greets, and then he waits for a moment like he's expecting her to say something back.

She says nothing.

"You good?"

The words register, and she has no words to respond with. She feels sick, tired, and pained, but there is nothing to be done for it and she can survive.

She doesn't answer.

Instead they stand there in the field as the sun sets, and he seems to garner something she doesn't quite understand. It happens in the same way that it did with Michonne; like he sees something written on her empty face.

"C'mon, Runs-with-Koolie," he states softly, "You can hang the hammock in the trailer with the dogs and catch some sleep."

Maly doesn't move. It's a good idea -the trailer isn't as closed as the cab, and she can't sleep on hard surfaces anymore- but she doesn't know why he says it. Why are any of them being like this? What esoteric rules are they living by? She is vulnerable when she sleeps, and these cars are exposed. Higher -away from reaching hands both dead and alive that could hurt- is better than the trailer and the meat-pack.

She glances behind him and watches the other two watch her as the dig plastic spoons into tin cans. Still she holds her tongue, unsure of what to say. The words jumble and swim, mixing around in her head like food dye in water. She wants to convey something but she doesn't have the language for it.

Instead, she huffs short and quick through her nose as she makes eye contact with him, just as she would with one of the dogs.

He stares.

Maly holds the gaze until he blinks, only then sliding her eyes toward the trees again. It's safer there. Familiar. She hasn't been harmed high in the boughs yet, nor have they ever made her sick or wary.

And with the fading light of sunset to guide her, she begins her walk toward them.


	14. The Difference in Knowing

Maly knows what is coming before the others do.

It's the dogs that key her in, the way they always do. Even sick and uneasy inside the too hot cab she notices the noses that press out through the gates of the trailer in the rearview mirror, black dots against the chipped paint. Dirty muzzles slip through the slats and over the roar of the open window and rumble of the engine, there are the softest, faintest sounds of nervous scratching.

They want out, but they aren't barking. They know noise attracts danger.

She shifts ever so slightly in her seat, knuckles white and eyes half-lidded as the caravan begins to slow on yet another forgotten backwood road. There are dead around, and where the dead gather in mass the living must be wary.

So Maly is.

Before long she can faintly smell the sour, sickly scent of rot on the air herself. It squirms into her sinuses, causing her already upset stomach to clench painfully as walls emerge at the end of the gravel. They jut up from the earth, jagged sheets of roofing metal and fence welded together already spotted with wear and tear, built to block out anything the inhabitants could not bear to face. Walls like this, she thinks, are built for those who want to protect a life like before.

Walls like this allow a separationist state of mind, as if what is inside and what lies outside exist on different planes instead of just one place.

Stupid, Maly thinks. It is what it is, and no wall will protect you from the world.

Ahead, a figure darts out of the first car and begins a rapid, hobbling race towards the structures. For a moment she feels something stir inside her -an urge to call out, maybe- but she cannot find the words or care. Instead, she unlatches her own seatbelt as the engine cuts out, rolling out of her seat with unsteady legs as the air fills with buzzing cicadas instead of overloud motors. Her booted feet hit the ground, and for a moment her knees lock, stiff and uncomfortable with the tension she holds in her body.

They do not give, and Maly forces her steps towards the trailer as the others begin spilling from the vehicles as well.

She watches them only peripherally, an instinctual marking of positions and observation of the movement of others. Already they are gathering into their pre-made groups, assembling in some sort of order she has yet to fully work out. Red with the Liar and the woman in the short top, sniper rifle joining with Glenn and the green eyed girl alongside the shot and tired looking one. Michonne is looking out toward her, something unreadable in her gaze.

A flash of something goes through her when Rick takes after the straggler, but she can't name it. Irritation, perhaps. It is poor leadership and even poorer planning. They don't know the area, what entrances or exits here may be. The stink of the dead is heavy in the air and there is no surety of their number or what kind of density their spread may be like. They haven't written inventory -they have no idea who has what or what they even need inside those walls- and they haven't organized groups for ranging, scouting, or collecting. They haven't made their purpose clear and the directions solid.

It is sloppy, she thinks as she slowly undoes the latch to the trailer.

But she is not.

With a soft squeal of metal, she opens the gate to the back and the soft scratching becomes a clatter of claws against a hard surface. A first it is one dog scrambling to get out, but shortly thereafter they surge toward the exit. There's snapping but nary a snarl as they flood outward, and the smell of dog shit and old meat lingers in the air as they move.

Maly watches them idly, wary as they pass around her like water around a rock. A brave mutt -the same shepherd that regularly tried to seal her pocketed catches- nips in her direction on its way past, but a swat sorts it out and none try again.

"Maly," a voice greets.

She ignores it.

Instead, she watches the meat-pack stream out and away from the settlement, a mass of fur and filth. With aching limbs she hefts her pack a little higher on her shoulders, blank eyes following their silent, nervous path.

"Maly, what are you-"

"Only death waits in there," Maly interrupts apathetically.

There's silence, and she takes a moment to mull over the fact that those words, that time, hadn't really required much thought. She isn't actually sure she needed to work out any of the sounds. It just...happened.

She tries to do it again, but her tongue is heavy and awkward. Nausea rolls as she tries to whisper words, and all she manages is the faint keen a rabbit makes when its neck is snapped wrong. It's soft, barely even audible to her own ears.

Speckled ears perk and twist, and for a moment Meatsack pauses long enough to look in her direction. Funnily enough, she catches Squirrel Killer squint around her as well.

She turns to face Michonne -the speaker- and she realizes that the woman is doing that thing again. The bit where she looks at Maly like she both understands something she herself cannot.

"Any reason you say that?"

Many, Maly thinks, turning her eyes toward the mutts. As many reasons as there are locusts in this group. As many reasons as there are tires on the cars or pen knives in her pack.

She tries to say as such, but her stomach rolls and her joints hurt and the air reeks. She does not want to be here, and she is ill at ease in this situation.

So she trails a look to the meat-pack, their body language stiff and uncomfortable as they scamper farther and farther away, and glances back to Michonne.

She heads after the dogs without a word more, her booted feet hesitating for only a single, bloated second before she steps after them, away from the others. The meat-pack barely pauses, already busy getting their bearing in their new surroundings, but when she gets close enough a few send tentative huffs her way.

Maly simply shoves a smaller maybe-corgi out of her path, knowing that she cannot say what she wants, but she doesn't have to. She simply must do what she's always done.

Wait. Watch. Keep going.

Survive.

* * *

It takes Maly an entire tentative, cautious hour to make her way around the perimeter of the wall with the dogs. In that time she spots one large, gaping hole in the structure large enough to fit several vehicles through, and no less that six smaller breaks big enough for the dead to slip past. There's no fresh tire tracks, no footprints in the grass other than hers and the dogs, no divots in the baked earth and sod, and certainly no signs of human life for at least a few months.

It all points to what she already knows; there is nothing worth venturing in these walls for.

There's that flash again; that spark of something she hasn't felt in so long she can't really name. Frustration, perhaps. Irritation or anger, maybe. She simply cannot understand why they came here, or what drove them to go inside with no preparation or forethought. She doesn't even get why their actions matter to her at all, or even if they _do_ matter. All she needs to do is keep herself alive and they aren't necessary for that.

She doesn't understand.

By the time she comes back to where she started the nausea from the car ride has begun to wear off, but a strange sort of confusion has taken its place. The dogs -still unsettled, but more satiated now that they have had time to roam- ebb and flow around her like a tide as they come upon the vehicles once more, the locusts standing around them with their heads bowed and faces downcast.

There is, she notes distantly, one missing.

She remains unsurprised.

Her gaze feels flat and lifeless on her face as she pauses to consider the group before her, what sort of decision to make. They keep losing numbers, hemorrhaging life the way a cut artery loses blood, and yet there always seems to be more. They run on something she can't see, can't acknowledge, can't even fathom. At times it makes them strong, unbelievably so. In other moments it leaves them broken hearted and weak.

She doesn't know what to make of it.

She doesn't know if anything needs to be made from it in the first place.

Maly stands alone, across from the people she is both drawn to and repulsed by, and feels adrift.

"What was the reason?" croaks Michonne in greeting, and when she raises her dreadlocked head her nut colored eyes are red-rimmed. The sight of it stirs nothing inside Maly, it simply is, the same way it simply is a fact that Maly doesn't really understand what Michonne is asking.

"You said only death waits in there, Maly," Michonne clarifies. " What was the reason you said that? Why?"

Ah, Maly thinks.

"You took off with the dogs the moment the cars were parked like you already knew. Like you saw something. Why did you say that, Maly? What clued you in that the rest of us missed?How did you know someone would die?"

There are eyes raising to witness the exchange, and Maly feels them like a weight on her skin. A tangible presence that lingers on her nerves, heightening her awkward state of mind. There's a tone in Michonne's voice, something like mourning, but it's almost accusatory and it makes no sense to Maly.

 _Nothing_ seems to make sense to Maly.

"You knew?" asks another voice, and this one is wet and thick and angry. "You knew and you just left, didn't try and stop us or anything?"

Maly turns to the sniper woman, whose face is still stained with tear tracks. She wants to say that she wasn't aware it was her responsibility to speak the obvious, that she couldn't stop them if she tried, and that she just can't speak when she wants, but almost as if to prove her point the words won't come out. The thoughts simply linger in her mind, stuck there.

"Where were you?" the sniper asks, grief holding her tight. "You and your dogs could have done been there. If you knew you could have done something!"

Maly looks behind her to the perimeter she just checked, not making a sound. She was doing something.

"Maly," Michonne calls, and the smaller woman turns her attention back to her. "You aren't….if you knew, you have to do something. You aren't alone anymore. Being in a group means you have to take care of the people around you."

There's that look, the one that says she knows, but Maly is coming to suspect that Michonne doesn't actually know because nothing adds up. There's a disconnect-a chasm- between what these people think and do and what Maly holds in her mind as true.

She struggles for a moment, the thoughts too abstract to voice. Her throat struggles to contort right and her tongue swipes against the roof of her mouth as she fights to simply get the words out.

"No" she manages.

Because she isn't really part of this group, isn't really sure if she wants to be. They are weird and they don't make sense. They aren't clear in their communications or desires, and she tried to say something. She clearly stated that someone would die, and none of what occurred next was something she could have stopped in any way.

She is a stranger to these people. A newcomer. A grasshopper that remains undecided in the face of a hoard, and they don't trust her the same way she doesn't completely trust them. But hey are kind, have gone out of their way to accommodate her, and she has tried to do the same in turn. She got in the car for the second day. She went to scout the perimeter. She used the bandana to wipe her vomit even though it made zero fucking sense.

"No?" a voice asks quietly, as low and slow as the grave.

The dogs shuffle anxiously by her side.

Maly turns again, and there is Rick with his devil eyes looking straight at her. He has blood on his hands, his face, his clothes. She can see that whoever died, died in front of him.

"What do you mean, no?" another voice asks, and it is the teenager speaking again. He's loud, unreasonably so. They are still so very, very close to the dead, and the noise is bound to draw them.

"You don't get to just-," Carl say, and then he huffs, storming closer with all the indignation of a young teen who knows themselves to be right and everyone else wrong.

She shifts, trying to respond and never quite managing to make the sounds.

"This is a group. You don't get to just say no. You have to work with people or you die," Carl continues, and he's stomping ever closer. His body language is fraught and distressed, hands clenched into fists and words spat rather than spoken.

The boy's foot falls a few feet away and the dogs around her shift. She watches the one nearest the border tense and knows what is coming before it happens. Could have told him if he had only waited and listened.

There's no a sound as the canine pushes off the ground and lunges, and Carl rears back. His arms come up to guard his body as the dog's teeth clack inches from his leg, its empty jaw snapping shut with such force that the sound reverberates through the clearing.

For a heartbeat everything seems to still.

Which gives Maly just enough time to force sound.

"Not right," she tells them, a statute amidst the mass of agitated mutts.

"What isn't right? That you should have done something? That you are part of a group now?"

Rick stands across from her, a statue as well. But his gaze is fierce and his voice is like the faintest sigh that comes before a trapped fire blazes to life. Everything about him is a breath away from tearing the world asunder, and Maly doesn't understand the point of it.

Yes. No. All of what he said? She thinks.

"Too fast," she says, but it isn't what she means to state clearly. It doesn't accurately express her thoughts.

"Well, take your time answering," Rick says, and she stares at him, expression impassive and gaze unwavering. Inside she flits through her mind for the right way to express what she is thinking as if there might be a pre-written script for her thoughts, but there's nothing. There's just a lingering jumble of something she wants to verbalize but physically cannot.

Until, for seemingly no reason at all, _she can_.

"You moved too fast. I said something, but you all moved too fast."

Rick pauses, and suddenly she feels like the sounds are within her grasp. She knows with certainty what she wants to say.

"I told one of you, but the group split. Ineffective. Dangerous. Stupid," she says. "You didn't listen. You don't make sense."

"We don't make sense?" the woman of still waters asks, voice appalled.

"If you act the way you have been, more of you will die," Maly continues. "My existence does not change the consequences of your own actions."

Nobody speaks after she proclaims this, and in the silence that follows she meets they gaze of every person who lifted their head to witness the exchange. She is not liable for what they have done, and she knows this.

She makes her rounds until she meets the clear blue of Rick's gaze once more, and for a moment she thinks he looks like Meatsack ready to end its prey. It's not apt, not an actual physical likeness, but more of a tenseness around his eyes and a stillness in his body that tells her he could strike.

But Maly does not bow, does not look away.

Neither does he.

The cicadas drone on, and in the heat of the day with the merciless sun beating down on them all, something settles into place she can't name. The hint of violence passes, but the tension remains.

"We're headed north," Rick states finally. "Put the dogs in the trailer."

Maly doesn't speak as she tilts her chin in the slightest acknowledgment of his words. She doesn't really need to.

She can see in his eyes that he knows what she said was truth.

It doesn't help her, though. She's still stuck, still doesn't understand why any of this happened in the first place.

And she's beginning to suspect that it's less them not making sense and more of something that has gone wrong in her.


	15. Other Eyes

The worst part is that Rick came so _close_ to doing things differently.

His jaw aches from clenching it so hard, his hands white-knuckled where they fist around the steering wheel. The anger inside him is a force its own, frustration mixing with grief until he can taste acid on the back of his dry tongue.

He is so tired of getting things wrong. Every choice he makes has consequences. Not just for himself, but for everyone around him. That's what being a leader means. It is responsibility for the whole of the group. He doesn't just have his family, he has everyone, and when he screws up it can cost lives.

( _Amy, Sophia, Shane, T-dog, Lori, Hershel-_ )

So when things like this happen -when he sees yet another person pass, feels the blood on his skin and watches the light fade from their eyes- and knows that he knew there was a better option?

He loathes and mourns in equal measure.

He thought so hard about doing it another way. He came so very, very close to assembling a smaller party to scout and leaving the larger group behind. That way there would have been less chance to the whole, and a smaller group would have been faster and more maneuverable.

But he didn't. He didn't break the group up because he was more wary of an internal conflict than external threats.

Rick isn't stupid. He can read a situation and he knows grief isn't sensible. The group is still reeling from the loss of Bob and Beth, and with two newcomers there could be a clash.

If he's honest with himself, if it was only Father Gabriel he wouldn't worry.

But it's not just the preacher. There was Maly to consider. Maly who lived on her own, who showed resourcefulness in using any weapon she can, who had fifteen savage dogs, and who -when asked why she didn't kill- responded that there wasn't anybody to kill.

And Rick didn't trust that. Not yet, not when he knows she could do damage.

So he was between a rock and a hard place, and he opted to keep the group together.

It was the wrong choice.

Tyreese fell, and it was to the haunting sound of Walker snarls, a scene painted in an all too familiar red. There was nothing inside those walls but trapped and hungry corpses looking for their next meal, and the cost they paid for that information was too high.

And seeing her come after -hearing that she had suspicions about the place she barely voiced, that she was playing it smart like he considered doing- it was salt in a raw wound. She should have spoken louder, he thought, should have tried harder. It was like the Beth incident all over, where she spoke the words and he didn't understand until it was too late. If she knew enough to say such things then it was her responsibility-

-but no. It's not hers. The choice was his.

Maybe things would have gone differently if Noah hadn't run off, or if they had time to pause and think things through. Maybe everything that occurred wouldn't have if Maly spoke a little clearer, or if he had listened just a little harder.

But the way things went down is the way they happened. There's no going back, no retrieving what they lost.

There's only the hope that maybe something gives and they catch their breath, that perhaps the number of walkers thin the farther east they get and that perhaps there is some sort of society somewhere.

Rick has to hope. He has to try -and keep trying- because if he falters he's letting down more people than just himself.

His eyes glance down to the gas tank, the orange gauge reading close to empty.

He just has to keep going.

* * *

There's something wrong with Maly, Carol thinks.

Up ahead the short newcomer walks at a steady pace despite the raggedy looking camping backpack that must weigh at least a third of her body weight situated on her shoulders. Granted, she more resembles a gawky, stoic faced teenage boy than a woman fully grown. Her limbs are almost comically thin under the thick leather jacket she always seems to be wearing, but the point is that the stoic woman is pushing ahead tirelessly. It's as if the hours of walking before this cannot touch her, the scorching sun cannot make her pause, and the lack of expression on her face is eerie.

There's something just so off about that undisturbed state, something just this side of unsettling about that stoicness.

There hasn't been a word from her since the cars ran out of gas in the morning. In fact, there hasn't even been a whisper from her since the debacle at Noah's home and the loss of Tyreese. There's only a detachment, a yawning distance that is almost inhuman while pain and loss seem to etch themselves into the hearts of everyone else.

It's dangerous, that distance. Not in the way the governor was, or the way that the cannibals were. It's not up front and undeniable like the walkers, or abrupt and obvious as an illness.

It's slower. Stealthier. It's dangerous because it can be looked over so easily in the face of competency, but its very existence is so at odds with the group.

And it is very, very obvious that Maly is capable. She has never asked for more food, never asked for help, never even looked at someone in a way that may indicate she needed assistance.

But that independence -that quiet, insidious efficiency- is merciless. There's no room for empathy in Maly, and it seems that things like basic human emotion are beyond her grasp. It's not that she's cruel, but more she doesn't care. Not enough to get angry or happy or anything in between, not even for the nervous preacher that trails behind her like a buzzing gnat.

Maly just is, like a mountain just is.

And for a group that thrives because it understands that people matter and that together they are stronger as a whole, Maly is a threat.

Not a direct one, but one day those apathetic eyes could turn on one of them in need and simply glance the other way because the odds are unlikely. That vacant pragmatism could mean that Maly decides they are too much of a liability when they need her the most. She might not even try and help, not if she continues the way she has been, providing for herself and only herself.

Well, maybe the dogs get scraps here and there too.

But the fact remains Maly is skilled enough to be dangerous and apathetic enough for her to be a gamble. There have been hints here and there that show maybe she isn't as cold as Carol believes. Little Judith sucked down the Pedialyte Maly brought back and seemed all the happier for it, and Father Gabriel has to be clinging for some reason. By all accounts, there are traces of humanity left.

But is that snippet, that bit, worth nurturing? Is her capability worth the investment when weighed against the callousness?

It's a gamble, Carol thinks, eyes narrowed and lips pulled tight in a way that used to make her worry about wrinkles. Maly is a gamble, and Carol has always been one to hedges her bets.

* * *

The new girl is a weird one, and nobody seems to miss that fact.

It would be kinda hard to if Daryl's honest. Even if only he and Carol were in the car when she vomited out of the blue -and ain't that crazy? No noise, no heaving, just tense silence one moment and then upchuck all over. Sneak puking, what the hell- and then promptly tried to wipe it with her hand like a crazy person, there's been other signs. Right from the start, Daryl could have told you she was odd.

It's in the quiet way she watches everything, the stillness that seems to eat her up when she doesn't have something to do. There's no play of expression on her face, just a vacant blankness and a thousand yard stare. He's seen it before, and not just since the dead started rising. It's the look some of the more whacked of Merle's associates got, the ones that seemed like they had plum forgot how to be a person and only gave the vaguest effort of trying to act like one.

Only it ain't drugs. She's too lucid, too able to do shit.

And boy, does she know her shit.

He knows the knots she used for her snares and all the old methods Merle taught him to hunt way before he started focusing on his next fix and nothing else. He can see the ways her eyes slide around the leaf litter and the lines of trees, looking for anything out of place in the way that tells him she knows woods and wilderness just as well as that koolie dog that ghosts her steps.

She's not looking for the same things he is. Her eyes rake over squirrel nests and game trails with only the slightest interest, noting them and dismissing them as she moves. If he had to give a reason, he'd say it's because the dogs seem to find them long before she does and there ain't time to set snares.

But there is time to harvest as they move.

Daryl always focused more on the game aspects of foraging, and the first time she pauses to dig up a weed even he's thrown for a bit of a loop. He stands with the rest of the crew in silence, side by side with Carol and Carl as they give both Maly and the dogs a hard stare. It isn't until Michonne glances his way with a quirked brow and a gesture towards the leafy green that he looks harder and gets it.

First glance says Maly is losing it and picking weeds. The second one tells him it ain't a weed at all.

It's food.

"Grub," he grunts quietly, and the whole lot of them seem to have something click in their heads. He can practically feel the laser-like focus of Carol as she tries to memorize every aspect of the plant she can; can hear the quiet, surprised noise Carl makes.

Foraging for plants is a tricky business. There's lot of look-a-likes and even more that will make you sicker than all hell. He knows some -leeks, berries, that sort of thing- but the deft way the little woman thumbs through the greens tell him she knows more. It's an odd skill that he wouldn't suspect from her.

But what do any of them know about her?

Not much, Daryl decides as she tears the plants from the ground, her fingers speckled with grit. They know she runs with feral dogs, eats with her hands, and talks about the same speed as a slug moves. She's quiet, has a good head for tricky little traps, and the tenacity to thin an entire town's worth of walkers by herself.

But there ain't much other than that.

Maly is just a weird little thing that's here now, and Daryl can run with that. He gets that others aren't as fine with it; that her strangeness upsets them and the lack of information itches at them. She's cold and standoffish, and she doesn't really bother trying to change any of that.

But not too long ago Daryl refused to put his tent near any of the others. He was the odd man out, the one that saw the group as not making any sense, that shot and ate things they thought shouldn't be eaten.

The way he sees it, she's odd, but she ain't hurt nobody. Hell, she stopped some from gettin hurt and tried to prevent more.

As the group loses interests and moves on, Daryl waits for the new addition to finish her business. The cicadas drone on in the heat of the summer, whirring their song as the clouds pass overhead and a bead of sweat trails down his neck. Somewhere to his left a dog skitters through the underbrush, and the others tread on further to an unnamed goal.

But Maly stays still, just her and those weeds.

For a second he wonders if they left her if she would notice but the thought boils away just as fast as it came. Of course she would notice. She's weird, but she's still human.

"Hey, Runs-with-koolie. Pack's moving on."

The grimy woman tilts her head toward the sound of his voice, hands pausing over her bundle.

Then she stands and starts to move too.


	16. Long Walks with Unbidden Thoughts

There is something wrong with Maly, she knows this. A deviation from the standard, an inability to communicate, a loss of something.

She does not care.

Walk, she thinks.

Walk, and keep walking.

Her muscles hurt; they always do. A constant, chronic ache that haunts her mind just under the surface. The days of rest inside the cramped cab of the truck did nothing to help, and though she does not have to contend with nausea now, she is still paying for the extended period of stillness.

It jars her knees when she steps, but she does not stop. Cannot.

She simply continues, although it is different than before.

Traveling with people is...slower. Ungainly and odd. There are starts and stops, constant adjustments from individuals that sneak up on her. If one person isn't adjusting the straps of their bag someone else is, or yet another is tying their boots or drinking their water or slipping off to relieve themselves or any number of things.

It also becomes evident that they are loud. Not much, they do not speak often -too consumed by the heat and low morale- but they create sound nonetheless. Little huffs and shifts in breathing, the heavy tread of their feet on the ground, the rustle of their gear and occasional soft murmur or a cough.

Before -when it was her and the dogs- there was only Maly's pace. Before there was no one to keep up with or wait for, no human noises.

Still she does not understand why. Why the anger and blame, why wait or match, why compare at all?

The questioning doesn't serve any purpose. There is nothing about thinking about what was and what is that helps her. Dogs or people, she must live. She just needs to keep going, to find a way and survive. This confusion does not complete anything, does not help.

She just has to keep walking.

One foot in front of the other as the overwhelming heat of the day bakes her inside her jacket. She shifts her weight forward as sweat slides down her neck and face, her mother's krama wrapped around her to keep the burn away, red checkers fading from wear. The stone she has in her mouth is gritty and rough against her tongue, but it keeps her mouth moist and abates the thirst that would have her breaking rations on what water she has.

The world is wide open, the air free of fetid stench and heavy on body odor and canine.

She keeps going.

Her legs move mechanically beneath her, her mind a curious blank. She notes things idly and in passing as they occur, filtering them through what relevance they may have to her. Father Gabriel is sidling as close as he dares, wary of both the group around him and the dogs that seem content to trot around her. Four broke off earlier in the day and have yet to return, something that went unnoticed by all but a few. She knows they will return or they won't, but either way she will continue on.

Red and his group travel to her left, the most energetic and least grief ridden of them. She doesn't know what goal they have, what purpose drives them, but they move like a set with something in mind. Or rather, Red stares ahead with purpose and the others follow his lead.

Occasionally he will send glances to Rick and his, who travel just the slightest bit faster and to her left. Their steps are quieter than the heavy march of Red's group, their eyes scanning around as they move. Each person seems a bit more coiled and simultaneously more worn.

It does not escape her notice that they are flanking her as she walks ahead with the dogs.

She watches them from the corner of her eyes, the same way they watch her. Always aware and moving, their presence is a constant weight that has dragged at her since they followed her up to the trees without explanation.

Slow, she notes. Unused to the forested ground. It seems to her that if she had not headed to the cover of the woods they may have taken paved roads instead of rougher areas. The pavement would have been easier to tread, but it would have been even hotter, an oven made from sun and asphalt.

And when water is scarce, heat is the enemy. Every drop of sweat that drips down is dangerous.

It's not just the loss of liquids, either. The sweat soaking her skin is moist and heavy as it catches in her clothes and it drags against the grime coating her skin. She knows first hand that heat rash is nigh unavoidable and that the moisture sends chances of infection and rashes skyrocketing.

She cannot afford such things. Any slight dip in temperature is to be coveted, and the terrain may be harder here but the heat is a few degrees lower. It's worth the burning knees and cramping back.

Everything is give and take with survival. It takes more energy and time to travel the woods, but the cover is better as is the foraging. The heat of the road would be easier on food stores, but harder on the water. She could travel alone, but people-

She does not know what this group gives her. She doesn't understand much about the whole situation. They were angry at her for no reason and now they are flanking her, but they haven't attacked or been overly threatening. They keep looking at her when she checks the maps or stops to peel the stems off greens, and she doesn't know what they want. What they give to her, why they are going north, why she is headed toward an area with denser population distribution and more dead.

Or why she ever even came back here in the first place.

She keeps walking. It will take days of hard travel to reach tributaries of the James River, which will be their safest bet to the north-east. Any other thoughts are non-essential.

She is, and that's that.

* * *

When the sun is three fingers from the treeline, they stop to make camp.

For Maly setting camp is checking her inventory, maintaining equipment, in taking nutrition, expelling waste, and scaling a tree before the light fades entirely. It's a rhythmic affair that she has done again and again so many times that it has become a cadence of its own; one beat after another after another. She knows that if she stops and rests on the ground in between moving and sleeping she may not have the energy to get up again to the safety of the branches.

So while the others sit and scout the area, Maly watches the dogs while she counts out her water -4 gallons, at this rate that's three days- and begins to take stock, picking at fingerfuls of the shepherd's purse. It's tough and bitter when uncooked in the way collard greens get when they are too old, and the dirt that clings to its leaves grinds between her molars as she chews. As usual, it is a wholly unsatisfying meal but enough to sustain her.

Likewise, the dogs have their own pattern. Often they will scrounge for food in the sunset hours, a few with her as most go off to scavenge. They groom and huff as the order is established and maintained amongst its members, each canine too tired to do much more than flop down and pant.

After checking her maps and food stock she turns to relieve herself, slipping off a ways into the brush to answer the call of nature in nature, the quiet murmur of voices trailing after her as she goes. The sound washes over her even a fair distance away, hushed whispers of long forgotten words.

"Goddamn hot as the fourth circle of hell."

Red, she notes distantly.

"The fourth circle of hell didn't have fire. It had people pushing weights."

Gabriel, which surprises her.

"Then whichever level of hell had fire."

"The sixth and seventh."

"What does it- the point of the matter is that it's hotter than balls. "

She tunes it out as best she can because the circles of hell have no bearing on her actions right now. She can't say what she believes in, or if she has any kind of faith at all. All she truly knows is that she is tired, her hands are shaking, and it's time to pull up her pants and sleep.

She goes to do just that.

"Heat don't matter much, but the bugs are bad enough. If the walkers don't eat us, the mosquitoes will."

The pig tailed woman, Rosia? Rosatia? She has a side arm and a cool gaze...

"Mosquitoes would have to beat the sweat bees. Or the black flies. So many damn flies."

Maly scouts the clearing for a suitable roost for the night, pacing the perimeter of people. They cluster, hot and sweaty on the rough earth as they work cans open and swipe exhaustedly at damp foreheads and invisible insects. It's good, she thinks, that they know better than to start a fire. Even if a low smolder could have helped with some insects, the light is a signal flare and it's better to crush pineapple weed or cedar against the skin.

"Just waiting for a bite to get infected. What a way to go."

"Don't be a bitch and quite fucking scratching at them for godsakes."

She pauses in front of the spruce she's staring at, the first warbling call of whip-poor-wills starting up as the hushed conversation continues. They aren't loud -not near enough to match the buzz of cicadas- but they are a noticeably off sound. She can't hear her dogs snuff around over the talk and has to strain to catch the birds fluttering through trees.

For a second, Maly is reminded of the low chatter of breakfast diners in a sleepy little town she once knew. The clinking of plates instead of cans and the smell of breakfast food heavy in the air as she leans against the back of her booth, smiling at someone across the table as she tucks a strand of her long hair back behind her ear. She can picture the cheap tables, the cool air against her skin from the AC directly overhead, and the morning rush just outside the big bay windows.

Something in her chest knots, hard. It winds so tight it's an actual sensation becoming an acute pain that overwhelms her for a moment.

She can't name it, doesn't care what it's called. She just needs it to stop.

With a stiff, stilted step to the right Maly ditches the idea of choosing a roosting tree for a moment and scans the area. There's no nodding onions, no garlic or smudge wood this far east, but this is a mostly coniferous forest and there's always, always a cedar.

And there -where Michonne is leaning- is one of good age and health.

Maly heads toward it.

The movement catches the other woman's eyes, weighing and measuring Maly as she nears. Always searching, those eyes, always looking for something Maly doesn't have to give.

For the briefest of moments Maly meets them head on before her gaze switches back to the tree, dismissive of the quiet sword wielder using it as a backrest.

"Maly?"

Maly doesn't answer, her hands already reaching out to rip needles from the branches. The action causes the low-hanging bough to bounce raining bark chips and broken leaves down on Michonne, who sputters lowly and stares at Maly aghast.

Maly makes no face back, meeting her eyes again and holding them. For a moment they do nothing but stare at one another in silence, the noise droning on in the background.

"What the hell, Maly?"

Maly blinks and clenches her fingers tighter around the foliage in her hand.

"Bugs," she manages.

Michonne casts her a bewildered glance, but Maly pivots on her heel away from her despite the vagueness of the statement. It took far too much energy to get that little out, and Michonne is not the cause of the noise.

She steps toward the semi-circle of those who were -and still are- speaking in the barest of hums, only now the words are next to meaningless to her. Just alien sounds among the ambient calls of the night, as devoid of meaning as memories of something that has no place in the here and now.

They quiet as she comes forward though, trailing half finished sentences and leaving words unsaid as she uncaringly walks into the middle of the circular gathering. Maly can see the question in their eyes as she settles her stance and thrusts the fistful of needles towards the nearest one.

"Bugs," she repeats, showing them all the leaves. Words are harder than usual, even. She can't find them, can't parse but the barest of phrases. There's that painful knot that distracts her when all she needs to do is focus.

"What in Sam hell-" Red starts.

"No bugs," Maly says, cutting him off. She makes a vigorous scrubbing motion with the cedar around her sleeve covered arm, displaying how to disperse the scented oils onto clothing and keep the insects at bay.

Red doesn't answer, too busy looking at her with his mouth open and eyebrows drawn high on his forehead. His hands remain on his lap, though, and she stares at them until he raises his hand to take what Maly has provided him with.

She notices two things as the needles slip from her fingers into his palm. His hands are twice the size of hers, making them look childlike in comparison, and the whole camp has gone completely quiet.

Maly leaves just as abruptly as she came, and with even less explanation. All she can hear now is the trilling of nightingales and hums of crickets, and the sounds draw her back. This is what she has, this is where she is. The now is what matters.

Considerably less selective of her choice in tree, and tired to the bone, Maly picks a place to hang her hammock at random and begins to ascend in order to sleep.

"I'm sorry," she hears from below. "Did that girl just hand me fucking twigs and disappear up a tree?"

She wonders who he is asking because the whole camp was watching.

Someone else answers, voice low and quiet, and the hum starts back up again despite the fact that she solved the problem and there should be no noise. The feeling in her chest returns, a steady thrumming clog that seems to climb higher as time passes. It clenches in her throat, a sensation that is scratchy and raw even though nothing is there to make it so.

It's useless, she thinks. There's no reason for it. No cause. This serves no purpose and completes no goal.

But with the sound of people below her and no work to distract her, she cannot stop it.

For the first time since she started walking, memories rise up like the dead that buried them.


	17. Distracted Detours

Maly wakes the next morning with scratchy eyes and half remembered dreams in her head.

Her vision is obscured by hammock wall, and the contents of her bag sink into her tense flesh of her neck. That musty, familiar stink that coats her body and her bag wafts through her nose, heavy and thick against her senses. It's grounding, in a way, her thoughts fogged with cardinal calls and robin jeers as she tries to remember the last time she dreamed.

She can't say.

She shouldn't have dreamed, she knows that. She didn't sleep long enough for it, her circadian rhythm further upset by that odd, awful feeling that smoldered inside at the sound of voices. That tightness haunted her, lodging itself in her chest and throat and building pressure at the bridge of her nose. Her eyes itched and pricked, and she still can't name the reason _why_.

She feels...she does not have a name for it. There is that lingering stillness, that certainty inside her that she must get up from her hammock because things need to be done, but for a moment she stays where she is, bone tired from sleeplessness and…

Illness? Upset?

She does not know.

The morning gray filters through the cloudless sky, a murky dawn already accented by screaming insects and humid heat. No breeze ruffles the green above her, and no white clouds break the periwinkle morning. For a moment there is just her and that nameless want, that ache.

Somewhere below her, a dog huffs loudly and someone shifts on the ground -the sound too heavy and ungainly to be a sleeping animal- and the noise draws her from her haze.

It does not matter, she decides. There are jobs to be done, distances to travel.

She rolls out of her roost and gets to work.

It should be that simple. The maps need checking, her bag repacked, and she needs to eat something before she heads out. It's a practiced routine that she knows in and out. She checks the meat-pack and counts heads, gets an idea of her terrain, and then she goes.

Easy.

But as coolly and efficiently as her body flows through the motions, she mentally finds herself unacceptably distracted. She keeps recalling things that make no sense, retracing memory paths that have lain dormant for as long as this has gone on and finding ghosts in places where none should haunt.

They don't matter, she knows this. She understands that things aren't the way they were and that the world moves ever on. It's just an errant fact that she has to deal with. Survival is hard, life can be dirty, move on and keep going.

Yet she keeps thinking of little things; the stubs of her mother's missing fingers clasped tight around her palm, the seas of hay grass outside her childhood home that undulated like an ocean in the breeze, the lights of the city shining through her apartment window, distant stars brought to earth.

And she doesn't want to.

There's no reason for it. No direct cause other than some half-hearted gesture Glenn makes as he wakes up, or a particular sound that hits her ears just right. Combined with the gritty sensation of her eyelids -a byproduct of too little sleep- and that constant pressure that squeezes at her, she's distracted.

It eats at her, that distraction. She does all that needs to be done, but it's lacking somehow. Less.

Like she's missing something.

She doesn't try to fight it, nor does she even acknowledge it. It just is, a silencing specter that haunts her head space as the group readies itself, and then onward as they move. Even the crunch of twigs beneath boots and the sporadic sound of people shifting cannot shake it loose. If anything, the pattern she falls into when hiking -feet moving automatically, eyes always scanning- allows it to grow, taking up valuable space that should be focused on staying alive.

Maybe it's that sensation, maybe it's the exhaustion or the low rations, but somehow Maly misses the heavy marching of boots coming nearer from the side. Or rather, she doesn't register the meaning of the sound until it's too late.

"You know those twigs don't last for shit, but they sure work."

It takes perhaps even more time than usual to sort the meaning of those words out, not only because of syntax, but because the meaning is so... strange. She isn't sure she has it right and is rapidly becoming unsure of the situation in general as the seconds tick by.

She glances to her side. And then up. And up some more.

Red grins at her, straight teeth set in a strong jaw. He's not close, still several feet away, but he's definitely near enough for his size to be immediately evident. He's a large man by any standard, with a build geared for power and brute strength. His gait says the pace he keeps is not new to him, nor is marching.

She notes these things but they pass by hazily, jumbling into the mix that already fills her cottony head. She doesn't have the will to do this or the energy to spare.

"Got any more woodland-hippie know how? A way to beat the heat? With that jacket on you must have some secret to keeping cool."

Maly looks at him with half lidded eyes. He's loud and the way he speaks is odd. His words and voice boom inside her skull, though she knows he's not speaking above normal volume. It's the octave, though, just this side of too rumbling, nothing that could be mistaken for anything else. Too distinct. Too human.

She wants it to go away.

Her body works without thought, unused to the company of anything but the canine variety. Her cracked lips part, teeth exposed in a manner that Meatsack would have understood.

Red does not.

Instead he flashes his own, a wide smile in exchange for her bared teeth. His chest inflates as if he's drawing a breath for even more talk, and Maly slides her gaze away from him, already preparing to pick up the pace in order to avoid the situation altogether. She just needs to focus on walking; everything else is negligible.

Save, perhaps, the way the dogs are acting.

She catches sight of the change only because she is used to reacting to it. The slight downward turn of the heads and the subtle shift in direction is a clue to her, a cue to follow their lead. Every perked ear is twitching and the huffing grows louder as they draw air in through their nose, smelling something she yet cannot.

This is something other than unwanted sensations and irritating talk. This is something she knows.

She reacts in tandem with them, tilting her course to better align with theirs. Her change in direction momentarily puts her in front of Red's straightforward path, but she leaves it just as soon, oblivious to his bewildered glance.

"Gotta piss?" he asks her.

Her jaw works slowly, chewing on the sounds she wants to make -Hush, shut up, pay attention- but none make it out. It should be obvious, she thinks. Explaining this would be like trying to explain why she gathers food or why she breathes. She moves because the dogs are moving; because she wants to stay alive.

"The dogs," she manages, her voice flat and inflectionless.

If she cared enough to turn around and watch his face, Maly might have seen his eyes flicker over to a few of the mutts, his brows furrowing in confusion. But her pace was set and attention elsewhere, never mind the fact that his expressions were worth nothing to her.

"I can see them, but that there is south east and I was operating under the assumption our course was rather more north."

Maly knows this. She plotted the course this morning, she isn't dumb. However, paths can shift and change once the destination is known, and there's no point in taking unnecessary risks like pushing ahead when danger lies that way.

She doesn't say any of that, though. She doesn't even try. It's tiring to have to constantly explain herself, to justify why she does when it should be read with a glance. They need to take care of themselves, and she doesn't have the brain function to spare scraping up words. It's too hot and she's too tired.

Unknown to her, her actions and sparse words are drawing attention. Heads swivel slowly to focus her as she stalks away, breaking apart from the group as a whole to chart a new path.

"You know, you don't strike me as the type to follow some pups because it strikes your fancy," Red calls from behind her. "Anyone who runs on an SOP like you do don't change for much."

It takes her a long, long moment to dredge up memories of that acronym being used. The specter grows, her face going lax as the flickering impression of bay rum aftershave and the creaking of an old recliner flit by.

She wonders what her dad would have thought of all this.

"Care to share with the class what's running through that head?" Red asks.

No, she thinks as the tightness in her throat increases, leaving her confused and upset by its onset. She doesn't care for that thought at all. She just wants to do as she has been doing. She just wants to keep going and _be_.

"Maly?" someone else calls. The voice is farther away; smoother. Michonne.

It's obvious, Maly wants to snap. It's right there in front of their faces. Literally. They saw how the dogs acted in that stupid town. They should know, shouldn't have to be led along like errant children.

She's too tired, Maly realizes. Too distracted and-

-whatever else she may be.

She stops walking, standing still for a moment to ground herself. This sort of mental-multitasking is getting her nowhere. She needs to get a grip and quit wasting energy.

"The dogs," she forces out flatly. "They know-" _when there's too many dead to fight, how to avoid danger, how to weigh resource output and intakes, more than you_ "- to avoid hoards."

She breathes in, her words hanging in the air. Slowly, the sounds of footsteps taper of as everyone stills to pay attention to what is being said.

"Hoards?" Father Gabriel asks.

"Herds," Chimes in another voice, hard and unyielding. Rick. "The dogs are an alarm system. That's how you knew what was inside Noah's community before us. Because the dogs can sense the Walkers before humans can."

Maly registers his words from somewhere behind her and doesn't bother to turn around. Of course that's how she knew. It's right there for anyone to see.

"And now they're spooked," chimes in Squirrel Killer, and somehow the quiet tracker is a few yards to her left, having shifted without her notice. Quiet, that one. Very Quiet. "You see tha', change and shit up to match."

Obvious, she thinks, leveling him with a flat stare.

Her squints right back at her, his eyes narrowing on his dirty face.

"Why didn't you say that from the start?" Abraham demands of her. "Hoard, herd- the dead are an issue. You know if we can take them?"

Take them where, she thinks coldly.

She hears Red huff after his pause for her to talk remains unfilled.

"Kinda an important question, here. Can we, or can we not, fight them?"

No, she thinks with sudden realization. How would she even estimate that? The dogs can sense them, not her, and they presumably do it by scent. Either way, conflict takes too much time and energy. The safest best is to avoid and preserve rations.

"Maly," and then footfalls coming closer. It's Rick, she can tell not only from the voice but his gait as he crunches over the leaf litter.

The man steps between her and Squirrel Killer, breaking their stare off. She notes his face is burned, and the sweat seems to drip off him even more readily than it does her. His face is flushed from exertion, but as usual, his eyes are cold.

But the hard expression on his face fades when he sees her face, dropping off into one she can't place. He scans her for a split second, something subtle shifting in his stance.

"Have you been sleeping?"

The jump makes her head spin, or maybe it's everything else.

It's...in between the car rides and the people and the noise, her rest has been less than adequate, but she's still capable of movement. She can still walk and forage and feed. What does it matter? What does this have to do with the dead? Why are they even stopped? Why all this talking?

It's too much. She can't handle this sort of nonsense, not when the dogs are getting farther and farther away.

Her arms raise slowly, palms flat as they to hover around her head. She needs to focus, and all this noise isn't helping with that strange feeling. She just wants it to stop.

 _She will make it stop._

She puts her hands over her ears, and the effect is immediate. There's nothing now but muffled sound and the sensation of hot fingers against her skull.

"You talk too much," Maly works out, her eyes wide as they slide to meet Rick's. Her own voice vibrate loudly in her skull, warped and odd, but the change is worth the quiet that follows.

The noise can't distract her if she can't hear, and the fugue will fade if she maintains the silence. All she needs to do is watch the meat-pack, because the group? The group doesn't matter.

Maly steps ahead, and she never notices the look of dawning realization that comes over Rick's face, or the signal he gives to everyone to follow after her.


	18. Heat Daze

The night is hot.

That is the constant of this season, after all. Heat so strong it causes waves of warped air to rise from the ground during the day, and so intense at night that any covering feels suffocating. It's a warmth so strong it becomes an embrace, an unrelenting hold that sinks into her bones and boils the air in her lungs.

The shirt underneath her jacket is stiff with dried sweat, still just this side of tacky, allowing it to cling where she wants it least and chaffing against her back. Underneath her breasts, her skin had turned red and puffy, itching with prickly heat rash where her bra meets her skin. It's uncomfortable and unsightly, but she has no energy to raise her arms and scratch at the irritation.

Even with the sun gone, the temperature is still high enough to make moisture bead from her pores. Her thoughts are clouded and sunken, slowly boiled away by the exhaustion, environment, and that feeling she can't place.

Maly's throat already feels rough, half from the constant tightness in it, half from lack of moisture. No pebble sucking or tongue chewing can keep her mouth wet, not when the stones seem to take more saliva to moisten than they help produce, and not when her tongue is a dry, rubbery thing in her mouth. Swallowing feels like she is trying to move dust down her neck, her throat too constricted and devoid of anything wet.

Symptoms of heat exhaustion or chronic dehydration. It's equally likely at this point.

She blinks. The thoughts in her head are a distant, exhausted fog. Her eyelids feel gritty against her cornea, and she stares ahead unfeelingly at the scenery ahead of her. There are cedars and pines, their scent heavy in the summer air and their needles thick beneath her. Junipers are rarer here, the spruces all but gone. The forest is shifting, changing ever so slowly as they move ever onward.

The river is a day away, at most.

Distantly, she knows it should have been sooner.

With a bleary gaze, she observes the world around her in the passive way one does when they don't feel present. The locusts swarm lazily, slow and groggy, unused to the weight of their packs or the way one's knees swell and ache, tired from the distance the detour added to the journey. She can see a few trying to rub life back into their feet, palms pressing down on flesh just getting used to long travel.

A bead of sweat slides down from her hair as she stares, carving a path through the grime on her skin, and slips into her eye. The sting of it makes her mind stutter for a moment, a distant thought drifting by with muffled urgency. She needs to get up in the trees for the night. Needs to rise while she still can.

 _Move_ , she thinks to herself. _Keep going._

Her body weight shifts, tilts forward, and her feet plant themselves flat against the ground. With an exertion that is more rote than will, she flexes her muscles and goes to stand.

Her knees buckle.

Maly sinks back to the ground.

There's a jagged stone digging into her shin, its sharp point biting through the worn fabric of her too-stiff pants, and her legs are awkward beneath her. She can feel the pressure or every twig crushed beneath her weight, and the tug of her bag on her shoulders. For a long moment, there is just sensory information trickling in, her mind not yet caught up to the fact that she did not succeed in her attempt.

Eventually, though, it registers.

 _Get up_ , she tells herself, shifting slowly back into position. _Get up and stand._

Muscles tense, sweat beads, and her joints scream as she focuses on the task at hand. The fog inside her mind makes it hard to gather up the willpower to force herself to get to her feet, the heat eating away at her head. But she can do this, she knows. Has done more with less.

Her calves and thighs strain, a muscle spasming erratically as she grits her teeth and raises inch by inch. Her head pounds. She sees spots.

She falls.

Her attention narrows, mind gripping onto one thought only. Nothing else matters; only this. Only standing, forcing herself up and beyond. Only to keep going.

Once more she plants her feet, steady and firm beneath her. They anchor her to the earth, as solid as stones, and she keels forward more than she leans. The momentum of throwing her body carries her and all she can think is get up, get up, up, up, up.

Then she's on her feet, her head throbbing and bones aching, but she is standing.

One last time she casts her eyes around the group laid out around her, distantly feeling like she's staring at them through a pane a glass.

A few yards away, Michonne's eyes meet hers, nut brown turned almost black in the darkness. They are a stark contrast to the blue pair next to her, but only in color because both seem to carry that same knowing gaze, that understanding Maly herself feels she does not have.

She does not care.

Neither Rick or the swordswoman move as Maly makes her own way onward, and the sounds of the night fill her ears instead of murmured voices and words. It isn't until she's up in her hammock, halfway unconscious already, that she hazily realizes she hadn't heard theirs or several others voices at all that night.

She doesn't think on it; she simply sleeps.

* * *

The dogs know first.

It's late in the morning, the time when the heat of the day is slowly coming to full fruition, and even with the trees to shade them there is no reprieve. Everything is slow and ache, tiredness seeping in despite sleep because the temperature leaves no room for anything else. It just is, unrelenting and unforgiving.

But the group moves on because the other choice is to sit and die. They move now when the dead are at their least active and when they still have the strength to go.

But.

The dogs.

Move.

And Maly doesn't know why or how because the grimy mutts are just as tired as the humans. There has been no water to spare them, no sweat to cool their bodies. Just fur and stink and instinct to push their pace ever onward, four feet stumbling as they pace the hard earth.

But she watches them -an exhausted and worn down pack with pink tongue lolling and dried, cracked noses- pick up the pace with little warning. They veer right sharply, hustling through the underbrush and off course from the main river yet again.

It's not fear, though. Not wariness or caution. Maly reads the lines of their bodies -the upturned tails and perked ears, the held high heads and open mouths- and she knows that this is excitement.

Maly follows.

Because the canines are lower on reserves than anyone else, and they know the law of survival -more must be put in than taken out- and if they are expending energy like this, then that means there is something to replace what they are losing.

She focuses on them, something beyond that thick throat and tight chest surfacing for the first time in days. There's no name for it that she knows of with her limited words, nothing proper and right that people might understand. There's just this sudden determination that flows after, a conviction and lightness that if she can push past her swimming head and throbbing body she can receive something better.

So she does.

And behind her there's crashing in the underbrush, several swears drifting after her that she doesn't bother to un-jumble.

If given time and a desire to, she might have deciphered the fact that the others presume another change in course with a nearby herd. She might make out a "Fuck, again?" from Red and a low, twangy "Nah, 's somethin' else." from Squirrel Killer. Maybe she would catch the soft and quiet "Oh, Maly" from Michonne, or the steely "Follow her and keep an eye out." from Rick.

The words aren't important, though, just sounds, with as much meaning as the high pitched, short little yips some of the dogs give.

Only decidedly less excited and more nuanced. They take more attention -more energy- to work out.

So she doesn't.

Maly just runs, chasing the dogs.

It's not fast, not graceful and only barely coordinated. Her feet are numb and unfeeling, as clumsy as her slow thoughts. She staggers as vines whip their way across her pants, thorns hooking in and latching on to the fabric, torn loose by momentum alone. Roots and loose rock shift under her feet, making her almost lose her balance more than once. A branch she's too tired to dodge smacks into her, clouding her vision with a face full of wilted green leaves for a moment before her sight clears up again.

It's worth it, though. She knew it would be.

Because above their voices she hears it: the rush of liquid over stone, strong and steady enough to wash away any dead. The smell comes quickly after, that moistness that's not quite algae and not quite rain; a musk that belongs to running water.

By the time the trees are thinning out and the leaf litter is turning to stones beneath her boots, Maly is steadfastly unbuckling her pack as she forces her burning lungs a few more breaths onward. She can feel her impassive face flushing from exertion, her whole body dangerously hot and with no more sweat to it cool again.

The rucksack falls from her back by the treeline, and her shoulders sing at the lack of weight. A few steps later and a few feet away, the jacket joins it on the ground. Then a single boot a bit further down, its twin even further than that.

Maly doesn't stop running, and the first step into the water is a shock of sensation. It's _coolcoolcool_ when she is burning up, a tepid something against the relentless heat. She keeps going until the river itself stops her, slick footing and tired bones combining with rushing water to sweep her off her feet and send her plummeting face first into the river. There's just enough time to suck in a breath before her head goes under.

Beneath the surface is another world where sound is muffled and warped, and vision is blurred and muddled. She can feel her mouth hanging open -not drinking, just being wet for the first time in days- and feel her skin prickle as the current drags her body along with it. It's so cool, here, she thinks. So comfortable.

For a long while she stays that way, watching a cloud of shad spook as she drifts by, her eyes lazily following their shapes. She would stay this way forever, but her lungs are a searing flame in her chest.

Maly surfaces with a gasp of air.

The sun above is bright, much stronger than below the surface, and she blinks as it glitters off the surface of the river around her. There's a sudden influx of sound -no words, not really- just laughter and splashing and barks.

When she looks over, the dogs and humans are just the same: wetting their mouths and bodies in joy, making noise of contentment and play. Already someone is filtering with a water bottle filled with layered gravel and stones, and if there was shad there will be bigger things.

Slowly, she takes in the area. There is a beach of stone and gravel, littered with packs and supplies, and the river itself is no more than twenty yards across. It's steady and clear, the water tinted green by the trees around it and the plants beneath, and the opposite bank is raised bluff that sinks sharply in the water, cattails jutting near its shore.

Nothing is sure. Nothing ever is… but-

-but she can rest here, for a little while, with resources and food at her disposal.

She is content.


	19. Down by the River

The river changes something.

Maly can't pinpoint what it is, exactly. It's not just biological, the relief from the heat and the sweet taste of boiled water pulled from a seep well, clear droplets catching on eager tongues and cracked lips. It's not the confirmed relative safety of the area, the waterways clear of contaminants a mile upstream at least, and the treeline high enough away that flash flooding isn't a worry. It's not the half-days rest they get because they reached the river early, or first good sleep (for the given value of good) they catch that night. It's something else, something other.

But it is there as she wakes in the faded blue pre-dawn, a subtle shift in the way her body responds. Her throat does not close and she blinks nothing back, going from sleep to wake quicker than the days before. Her hollow stomach is still a numb pit in her torso, and her bones still weep with soreness, but there is this fragile expanding sensation in her ribcage, like a seed sprouting from a crack in the earth.

She cannot name it.

It extends further as she slips out of the branches of her tree, the rustling of boughs ever so faint when pitted against that babbling of water, and steps lightly near the locust's bed area. There's something in the way the guards on shift watch her -a lightness in the woman-of-still-water eyes, a strange warmth in Michonne's- and something different about the ones still asleep.

For a moment she simply looks at them all, bodies scrubbed clean with sand, their clothes still damp from a brief wash. There are no sounds exchanged, nothing other than glances, but the mood has changed.

Maly doesn't understand it. Doesn't have the words for it.

She doesn't really need to.

The leaf litter melts to river stone under her feet as she moves away from the camp towards the river's edge. There's much work to be done today, harvesting what the river has to offer. There are cattail roots to be pulled from the thick, fermenting mud near the banks, and young shoots to harvest near the same. Her fish traps -simple things of stone that work with the flow of the river and obstructions in the natural path- have had an entire night to be filled, and there are always rocks to overturn in search of crayfish. Her work knives need to be sharpened, the mats cut from her hair, and supplies hoarded as much as possible.

The list is never-ending, really. Clothes to be washed, body to be cleaned, supplies to salvage, dogs to tend- what is a sensation compared to that?

Nothing much, Maly thinks.

Something, that feeling says to her.

It gnaws at her as she creeps toward the water's edge, away from the camp and those silent stares. It isn't … it isn't like that haunted emptiness she had before that prickled at her eyes and unsettled her head. It doesn't lodge itself in the back of her throat, threatening to choke her. Instead, it swells and rests comfortably across her sternum, a reassuring weight that settles in the pit of her empty gut.

She shifts slightly on the balls of her feet as she stares down at the lapping liquid. It's different, but a phantom echo nonetheless. It's unnecessary.

By her side, Meatsack soaks the pads of its worn paws in the water, warm as it butts up against her side. By rote, her free hand reaches down to bury itself in its fur, but her fingers are met with resistance that proves difficult to thread through.

Maly glance down, her own grimy hand small in the light. Meatsack's fur is more matted then her own hair, the ruff around its neck thick with dried mud and filth. Her hand rests atop the mess indifferently, caked fingernails standing out to her for some unfathomable reason.

The mutts shifts, ears swiveling on its head. It glances at her face briefly, eyes holding hers for only a second before motion in the bushes a few yards away garners its attention.

At first, Maly thinks it is birds fluttering between branches, waking early as they tend to do. But there is no near-silent beat of wings or soft flash of feathers. Instead, a larger figure than her shifts through the green, footsteps inaudible even as they push forward with practiced ease.

She stands as still as stone and watches as Squirrel Killer steps forward, his crossbow slung across his shoulder, his eyes scanning his surroundings. They only pause when they land on her and Meatsack, his whole body stilling as well.

Beneath her hand, she can feel the grit of dirt flaking off as Meatsack breathes in and out, the minute motions of it a steady rhythm that matches her own.

The man sniffs once, short and sharp, in a way that reminds her of one of the pariah dogs in the meat pack. It's not quite dismissive or acknowledging, nothing in that manner. It is what it is, as is the quiet that lingers around them.

The man in front of her shifts in a manner directly opposite of the ease that he had before, stiff and awkward, his hand coming to scratch at his neck The tendons in his jaw flash in his cheek as if he chews something over, and Maly watches with a sort of sedate caution.

His gaze wanders for a moment before firming, and he turns his head back to her. The motions he does next are slow and exaggerated, easy to catch. His hand touches the butt of his crossbow, drawing attention to the weapon itself before leaving it entirely and gesturing to the woods to the east.

Maly stares at him blankly, cogs in her brain catching like old gears in a worn transmission. It's easy to understand, she thinks, once she gets that he's trying to communicate at all. Him, the bow, the woods. He'll be using it to the east.

Alright.

She nods once, showing her understanding and for a moment more they stand and stare at each other. She wonders if there is something she is supposed to be doing, something that comes next. Nothing seems necessary or needed.

Something, that feeling says to her.

Squirrel Killer breaks it, his gaze and body tilting past her. Unsure, Maly follows his form as he steps around her, making sure to give ample berth, and slips back into the woods.

After a moment she turns her head back down to Meatsack's fur, picking at the dirt there awkwardly. That sensation she had when she woke is shifting, settling like an amorphous mass in her liver.

Still, she cannot name it.

Still, she sees no need to.

* * *

The growing heat of the day is less daunting with water to cool her and quench her thirst.

By the time the sun has risen fully and morning has come in truth, Maly has already dug a dakota pit and boiled several pints of water, drinking it with a sort of greedy abandon as she works. In truth, she cannot say she savors every drop, but she does notice the lack of grit against her teeth and the slippery texture of her gums.

It is good, she decides.

In silence, she harvests her catches, barefoot as she sloshes through thigh-high currents. Her trap of stones has worked well, gleaming with a school of fat, confused fish. She has no net, no scoop, and no bucket to pull them from the water with; only her hands and a worn out shirt that she peels from her back, tying a knot at the neck and sleeves to make a catch.

It is heavy as she slowly swirls it up, the confused fish flashing their brilliant scale in panic as the fabric overcomes them. Her sore muscles waken enough to protest, but she continues.

Steadily, she pulls the haul from the river, liquid sloshing and pouring from the fabric. It moves in an unwieldy way, the school writhing as the water drains, bodies pressing against the cotton in panic. The fabric stretches so much that she can make out snatches of color from the individuals within.

Enough, she thinks as she eyes it, to spare one or two.

By the time the fingerlings are scaled and flayed, pancaked with salt and roasting in between two flat river stones -heavy ones no mutt could hope to move- she has already hooked one through the tail and left a trail of fishing line from her bag to a sapling on the bank. Another she splits in two, entrails trailing out of each half. One rests atop a sunken log, tempting any waterfowl down the way to eat and catch themselves on. Its sibling is sunken to the bottom of the river in hopes of a channel cat or carp.

Either and any would be a feast.

She keeps going. Sinking her feet into muck that swallows legs and reaches up to her calves, she digs for the starchy roots of the cattails, gathering them in the same stained and worn t-shirt she used for the fish. There are few young shoots this time of year, but the rare ones that grow are dug from the thick mud and taken as well. By the end of it, rich brown and black stinking scum cakes her almost entirely, but the bag that rests against her jutting hipbone is bulging and heavy. Enough for her. Enough for the dogs if she makes a gruel.

Maly flexes her cramping, filthy hands.

Good, she thinks.

The sun rises steadily in the sky, and time ebbs and flows as Maly works. For a moment the weight of seconds and minutes ticking by ceases and there's only the task at hand. Her focus warps and shifts to the sights and sounds of what is around her and the constant stream of things to be done.

She wrestles Meatsack in the water, cuts the matted clumps from its fur and rinses out the debris, then again to five other dogs as well. She beats her clothes in the visceral heat of the day and grinds out burrs and nicks in her blades. She traps and picks and toils as she once did, before. Before groups and people and too much talking.

By late afternoon, Maly has raked this small part of the river over, and its yield could carry her for days. The prep work needs finishing -the gruel still boiling down, the third batch of shad still quick curing- but there something tangible to show for her efforts.

Her heart is still in her chest as she runs the length of her blade carefully down the stone, wearing out the dents that came from hacking at the thicker stems of the cattails and, later, the shaggier dogs coats. Across the bank she rests on, a lone, brave thrush chatters over the babbling stream.

She holds the tiny penknife up after a moment, running her thumb horizontally across the edge as to not split her own skin. It will never hold an edge like a razor, but it is sharpened enough to work.

Maly folds it for now, starring at the stream, feeling the grime of travel and work against her body. The sun has beat all day against her bare back, prickling at the sensitive, heat-rash affected skin of her shoulders and bra-line, but the water has soothed it some. Now, as the caked muck threatens to dry, it itches and stings.

The instinctual urge to scratch comes and passes. Scratching could break open more skin. Could open up pathways for bacteria and infection. She should wash.

She will wash.

No sound leaves her as she stands, though her body protests, her joints weak and muscles tired. It is nothing new, she reminds herself, nothing she cannot overcome. She brushes it to the side as she makes her way over to the water's edge, passing the dangling fabric of her mother's krama where it flutters on a shrub, drying out.

Bath, she knows, then break down and finish before sunset.

Movement catches her eye; her own reflection staring back at her from the ripples of the bank.

Her hand raises to check what she already knows. Thick, knotted tangles meet her searching hands. Her own hair is as bad as the mutts.

Unbidden -uselessly- her thoughts flicker from the task at hand. Instead of grease and dirt, her mind recalls soft strands between her fingers, slipping as she tucks them behind her ears. For a moment an image with a fuller face and a stomach without a concave fills her mind.

A pressure rises like sickness, tight and uncomfortable in her throat. She has no use for it, does not want it.

She turns away, glancing at the penknife.

The clumps are a burden, heavy and unsanitary on her scalp. After washing, she will cut them away.

Still that pressure -that something- remains.

* * *

 **AN: Am I dead? No. Do I have a keyboard now? Yes. Shout out to my cousin for unearthing one from the depths of their room after hearing me whine for so long. No real schedule -I work a whole shit ton and moved alongside a whole slew of shit- but have a relaxing chapter after so long. Would love to hear feedback.**


	20. Learning Together

As always, Daryl hears the camp before he sees it.

The voices don't carry much, the trees and woods too thick to let out much sound, but enough that he can make out noise from a good fifty feet away, picking up individual voices at twenty. In a place like this -where the land stretches on and on forever, all thick woods and underbrush- it's like a pinprick on a junkies favorite vein. One sound against many, and you can only pick it out if you know what you're looking for.

It's good, this spot.

To tell true, he'd damn near forgotten what it was like to not be sick of seeing trees. After all that time hoofing it -ruck sack marching his lily ass, Abraham, he ain't no soldier- he hadn't wanted to see more bark for a lifetime. Was sick to death of the goddamn weeds and bugs. There wasn't any water, they were down to the last dregs of food, and damn did the ground suck as a mattress. That last week or so was a nightmare and a half, and he wasn't sure what would get them first between exposure, dehydration, or the dead.

But then the river.

Seemed like the whole world changed when they stumbled outta the brush to Runs-with-Koolie floating belly down in the murk, looking like a new drowned corpse. Like coming down from a bad high and having a moment to sit. There was shelter near the woods, water to work with, and tracks in the mud.

There was hope.

He's still sick of the weeds and bugs, and the ground is still a shitty bed, but he's got a doe draped across his back and he can hear the group's voice. He can count them off one by one as he gets closer, from Rick to Michonne to Carl to Caryl. Abraham and Glenn and Maggie an the nerd and Rosita and goddamn, even little ass-kicker's gurgles, and they sound better. They sound alive. It's only been a day since they arrived, but they sound better. They sound alive.

But there's one he hasn't heard in awhile.

She didn't talk much before, and maybe he's thinking about it too hard, but ever since the day she covered her ears and slunk away he's noticed how much noise she doesn't make. At first, it seemed like she tried, like she made an attempt to respond. Maybe it was reflex or something, one that faded the more she was around them.

Now she doesn't make a peep, as if her lack of talking can make up for the words that come out from the others. He don't think anyone has heard her say anything since they got to the river.

It ain't bad. It's just… _weird_.

Maly was a little off from the start, but the more the group seems to recover, the more it's obvious that Runs-with-Koolie isn't. She doesn't rest, is up before dawn every day, and works until the sun sets like a pint-sized machine. It didn't help that she didn't come back with anything much to show for it, though he's sure that he can't be the only one to have noticed her backpack being fatter and the dogs a little rounder in the stomach yesterday.

But dogs fed or no, pack or not, she ain't saying much. She just works and sleeps, staring forward with that blank thousand yard stare.

Even now, as he breaks through the underbrush into the clearing and every other person in the group lights up like a rocket in July at the sight of him -and damn it's such a change that it comes like a smack in the face- he bet she'd be staring off if she was there at all.

A quick look around tells him she's not.

A hand touches his shoulder, firm and welcoming as it helps shift the weight of the deer from his shoulder. Daryl turns away from where he was squinting, facing the man beside him.

"Little small, don't you think?" Rick greets. There's a note in his voice that Daryl hasn't heard since the damn prison, almost joking like. Almost.

"Bigger than yers, tha's for damn sure," Daryl returns.

Rick flashes him something that could nearly be called a grin, and Daryl doesn't even try to do that. It's good as it is, and he wouldn't change the exchange for shit.

"You didn't gut it," Michonne states, wandering closer with ass-kicker in her grasp. Kid's gonna be a spoiled brat with how much it's carried. Not like they can put her down most the time, but still.

"Gonna do it near the river. Blood might draw the walkers."

He doesn't actually know if it does for sure, but he ain't gonna chance it.

"Smart," Michonne comments, and then she flashes him a true smile, stretching from cheek to cheek. "Either way, I cannot wait to tuck in tonight."

"Who said I'm sharin?"

The grin turns a little harder, and there's a sharpness to it. Not for the last time, Daryl remembers he has personally seen this woman slice bodies clean in two.

"Nothin' needs to be said. You know better," Michonne teases.

"Unlike some people," comments another voice, and this time it comes from a bit away. A glance tells him it's Sasha, who has a frayed rag in one hand and the shell of a nine mil in another. The woman offers him a grin, despite the tone of her voice, but quickly goes back to solemnly cleaning her piece. As small as it was, the flash of warmth was more than he has seen from her since Bob's death.

"Come off it Sasha," Abraham calls from the other side of the clearing. He's grinning as he says it, but then again, Abraham is just one of those guys that always is smiling about some shit or another. Just the way he is. "Tiny weirdo got us to the river, right?"

Sasha doesn't answer at first, frowning and swiping the rag a little faster across her barrel. Things clean as a whistle, though. Even from a distance Daryl can tell that.

"Maybe she did," Sasha bites out eventually. "But I don't see any of the fish she was catching up here right now."

"I ain't even seen Tiny today. How can you be sure she's got fish?"

Sasha jerks her chin towards her weapon, specifically, the mounted scope on her gun. She must have been keeping tabs on everyone, but the idea of Sasha pointing her rifle down towards another member of the group gives him a seconds pause.

Runs-with-Koolie ain't the only one with a thousand yard stare these days.

"And what, you see her fishing and you think she has to hand it over? Go down and fish if you want some fish."

Sasha bristles like a tomcat seeing a pit, hands pausing all together in her work. She jerks her head up, far to furious for it to be just about this.

"Don't know if you noticed, but none of us exactly have poles, Abraham. Even she's not using one. I don't even know what she's doing to get them, I just know she has them."

"Maybe we should know."

Everyone pauses at the words, heads turning to face the speaker. It's the nerd with the mullet, crouched down beside Tara. He can't really make out what he's working on, some stick whittled down to a sloppy point, a pile of broken ones beside him. Whatever it is, it's probably not worth shit.

Eugene looks up, stiffening up under the weight of everyone's stares. He glances around as if to look for help, but when none arrives he swallows thickly, glancing at the stick in his hands as he explains.

"Seems to me that the newest member of our cohabiting group has gathered a large and useful set of skills particularly suited to surviving the environment without aid. One might say she lives by the Little Red Hen, and since she's shown a generally oblivious attitude towards social obligations, it might behoove us to instead try and cultivate some of the skills she has in ourselves."

Silence.

Inwardly, Daryl admits he is lucky if he caught a fraction of that shit.

Noticing incomprehension of the group around him, Eugene sighs.

"We can try and learn how some of those there skills."

That, Daryl thinks, looking around the group, ain't a half bad idea.

"It's not a bad idea," Glenn states from his place wrapped around Maggie. They don't cling like they did at first, but it is hard to come by them separately these days. "Problem is, Maly doesn't seem like a great teacher. It's kinda hard to give lessons when you can't talk, or stand people talking. Not to be mean, but I would feel weird asking and just having her stand there and stare through my soul."

"Then don't ask," suggests Rick.

Daryl turns to him, wondering what the other man is thinking. There's a light in his eyes and a tilt to his lips that says he's working out things on a scale a grade or two above Daryl's own. There's other things the man is seeing, slots fitting into place.

"Just do."

* * *

"How about this one?"

The green bundle in front of Maly is soft to the touch, feathered leaves fragile and easily bruised in the grasp of the hand that holds them out to her. The stems can't be more than a millimeter or two around, smaller than her pinky finger by far, and the stalk is hardly any wider. In this season, the white flowers that top them have no scent, almost withered away by the heat of the drought, making it the slightest bit harder to identify. Still, she can recognize the plant by the smell it emits

It's an earthy scent, not quite starchy or nutty, but something closer to yams than anything else. Like carrots, only subtler and tinged with almonds.

Water Hemlock.

She sets aside the broad, spinach-like leaves of the plantain plant she was gathering, and casts a glance at the teenager holding it out to her.

Maly shakes her head.

With a huff of breath, he pivots on his heel and stalks back off toward the treeline, tossing the entire plant off somewhere to the side with entirely too much force, grumbling beneath his breath. She makes no effort to catch what is being said, staring blankly at his retreating back and knowing it is futile to wonder why.

It's a waste of energy.

Yet, like the phantom sensations that seem to haunt her flesh, the question lingers somewhere in the back of her mind as she returns to work. The first day back on the river was straightforward enough. She worked for her next breath and the locusts did whatever they do. Presumably, it was also some sort of labor. I could have been rest, she doesn't know. Doesn't care, either.

But on the third day that changed. Hours after the sun had risen and she was turning over a new section of the river, tearing feathers from a grebe that had turned itself inside out trying to break free from her trap, the Korean man -Glenn, he had said- stalked through the bushes with the green eyed woman at his side.

Maly, busy, had studiously acknowledged their existence and continued in her work.

In turn, they had stared at her, no words spoken and no cause evident.

Granted, the way the woman moved her jaw and raked her eyes along Maly's jacketless torso, it had seemed like she wanted to speak. There's was something about the clench in her cheek that gave her away, and the way her sight lingered on Maly's wrists and stomach with an observant sort of intensity was unsettling.

But she didn't _say_ anything.

Nor did Glenn. He simply watched her hands tear the feathers from the giving flesh of the bird, separating them out into soft down she could use for flies for rod fishing, and the longer, stiffer flight feathers.

For a long while it was that. Maly sourcing out parts and them...lingering

But when Maly moved into the stream, by some unspoken consensus, they moved too. With bright eyes that felt heavy on her skin, they watched as she slowly gathered flexible saplings and long, thick twining leaves for a roughshod basket.

And, in turn, she watched as they picked their way across the slick stones of the river bottom, glancing at her every so often, as they sidled up to a group of river reeds and started cutting them down.

By the end of it, as she took in the thing they had created -a bucket that floated on the surface of the water because of the hollow reeds it was crafted from, with holes in the weave the size of her fist- she had only the tiniest inkling of what they were attempting. It was a rough mimicry of what she was doing, unusable because of the materials it was built with, but they had tried to learn.

In an attempt to salvage their work, she weighted the bottom down with stones and baited it for good measure.

(A useless gesture, as the bottom catch had been washed out when they checked it the next morning.)

That day seems to have been the start of a pattern, the breach of some unspoken boundary that she didn't realize was there. Every day since then there have been members of the group coming to where she works, glancing at her and doing… something. It's not always the same people, and seldom do they stay the whole day, but there's almost always someone there. Some, she notes, only glance at her now and then, sharing the space in the peripheral way some members of the meatpack do. Others -like Glenn and the green-eyed woman- watch and mimic in either an attempt to scavenge for themselves or prepare for the future. Most are silent, observant of the need to remain quiet.

A few, she thinks, are not.

"Maly," calls out another voice. The tone is upturned, energized and calm at the same time. It's false though, not quite true, but softer than some. It's a knife hidden in wrapped fabric, a mirror surface with raging currents beneath.

Yet again she halts in her work, and this time it's the woman of still water holding out a plant for her to look at. The leaves of this one are fuzzed, a softer, more sage-like green that the emerald of before. It's a young plant, not fully grown, and it's long stringy root trails beneath it like a tail.

Mullein.

Maly pauses completely this time, and the woman in front of her cocks an eyebrow as she reaches out a hand for the herb. That odd sensation -annoyance? Irritation?- fades away, and what remains is something else unnamable. Uselessly, like she has far too often these days, she remembers the way her mom and dad used to make this for her when she was young, how strange and bitter it was on her tongue.

"Maly?" the woman asks.

Hearing her name is odd still, and she shifts, only belatedly realizing she's been starring at the plant in her hand without response. There's none that come to mind, no words or explanations.

She runs her thumb through the fuzz. Mullein is harder to explain than hemlock, not a simple shake of the head. It's not for eating, but it is a useful plant. Teas from it are good for respiratory problems, helping ease breathing and sooth cough. The can keep it and dry it out, but she isn't really sure how to explain the process. Instead, she hands it back, choosing the closest thing she can.

"Medicine," she says, but it's hard to choke the syllables of it through whatever object is stuck in her throat. The sound comes out wrong, warped and breathy.

The woman of water freezes in her own movement to take the plant back, her eyes gone wide. Her hands -small but clean and steady- hover close to the mullein's dirty root.

"Maly?" she says for the third time. "Are you feeling alright?"

Maly stares at the plant. The tone she meant to come out was much different than the one that did. Is she is getting sick?

She sucks in a breath through her nose and tilts her head to the side, forcing the breath she took up and over her irritated esophagus. A rough, wet sound rends the air as she attempts to dislodge whatever could be stuck in her throat with rough hacks the same way a dog with food stuck in its craw might.

The first cough has little effect, but it does _something_.

So Maly does it again

The woman of waters is still waiting patiently when Maly turns back to her after a sixth cough, her airways cleared, the plant still in her outstretched hand. She's staring intently, her focus on Maly's face instead of anything else.

Maly jerks the fuzzy green in her grasp, gesturing for her to take it back.

Cautiously, the older woman grasps for it, warily eyes Maly the entire time. Frankly, Maly doesn't see why she's so hesitant now when she had no qualms about interrupting her work before.

Either way, she eventually takes the mullein and leaves, leaving Maly to wonder if her prolonged exposure to people has gotten her sick.

* * *

 **A: no editing and roughly done**


	21. Ever Onwards we Grow

Watching the newest member of their group is like watching a frustrated, confused machine that doesn't quite understand what confusion or frustration is.

To some extent, Michonne understands. There's an adjustment period after having been alone for so long that takes a while to get used to. It happened before the dead rose and she suspects it will happen long after she is gone as well. That awkward, tentative sort of touch and go where one feels out the moods and feeling of their new social circle. The testing jokes with new coworkers, the watchful eyes that see what is acceptable, the carefully listening ears. There's probably a name for it all, but Michonne only ever took Intro to Psyche as an elective in her college days and never went any further than that.

Not that it would matter here and now. Then again, maybe it might.

Because there's the normal getting-to-know-new-people thing, and then there is Maly with her blank face and her blanker eyes. She's nonverbal most the time, slipping around at hours beyond comprehension to most of them. She detaches from the group and drifts, and slowly, ever so slowly, they make their way up the river as the days melt into weeks, chasing resources in the water flow.

(And if you had told Michonne a scant six years ago she would be elbows deep in filth, chasing a turtle through waist-high water, she would have laughed in your face. But then again, she didn't think turtles could be this fast. Obviously, the rabbit and the tortoise story would have gone much differently in an aquatic terrain.

It only rankles a lot when the stupid amphibian -reptile?- takes off to deeper waters, leaving her empty-handed while Maly de-shells her third one in as many days.)

But more to the point, trying to understand what Maly is feeling half the time is a challenge in and of itself. It's something Michonne has to carefully read in the way she goes stiffer than normal. Not the awkwardly-staring-into-the-distance stillness, but the complete does-not-compute-processing-error that locks her in place. It's the flaring of nostrils as she draws a near silent breath, the way Michonne can track her slipping away from voices anytime more than one person starts speaking above a whisper or makes a decibel too much noise in general.

Trying to understand what is happening in Maly's head is near impossible and it doesn't help that Maly doesn't seem to understand either.

There's so much Michonne wants to ask, wants Maly to say, but she doesn't think it's a good idea. The day that Maly covered her ears and just walked away lingers in Michonne's mind alongside the knowledge that the other woman has no qualms about disappearing into the wilderness, leaving the group behind.

And Michonne doesn't like that idea. Not just because the group is learning things or because Maly is somehow useful in some way. But because that's not life. It's not all about scraping by by the skin of one's teeth, just getting by.

It's more. So much more. It's a list that grows in Michonnes' head as the days go by. The weight of Judith growing heavier on Michonne's hip, Carl's mischievous grin. Carol's steadfastness and Rick's strength. Eugene's weirdness, Sasha's passion, Abraham's endless cheer. Glenn and Maggie's union, their love, Rosita's wit, Noah's first bashful grin since he discovered his home was gone.

It's Maly's blank, uncomprehending stare as Michonne silently passes a handful of walnuts -a large portion of what she found for the day- into the slight woman's hand.

It's a pile of leathery shelled turtle eggs -damn near three dozen in number- that Maly casually dumps in her lap later that night.

(And it's definitely, _definitely_ , the smug grin she gets to send Dixon when he asks if she's gonna share.)

* * *

"What is it, Tiny?"

In front of them, gazing blankly through the underbrush, Tiny has come to a stop. It ain't strange, not really. Tiny has a habit of pausing every now and then, going stock still and just existing for a hot second.

Abraham ain't no stranger to it. He's seen it before, sported by a dozen different soldiers. Tiny ain't just freezing most the time, she's practicing situational awareness. The little bugger is listening, head cocked like one of the damn dogs milling about, face smooth and impassive and she slides it around to just look at the world around them. She takes note of every little thing, searching for some shit Abraham can't even begin to really fathom.

He's pretty damn sure that he doesn't need to, either. Tiny does a lot of thinking in that head of hers, he bets. Any more and there'd be too much thought, not enough action.

Eventually, at her convenience, she drags her eyes over to him. There's nothing in her face that gives her away, but a muscle in her neck jumps out when they lock eyes. It's jack shit in the span of things, nearly covered by that checkered scarf that brings grainy photos of Viet guerilla's to mind, but it's a reaction. From Tiny, that shit's huge.

He's pretty sure it's a tick that displays annoyance. He can't really be sure, be he knows he wouldn't mind one damn bit if it was.

Tiny's good. It's not just her admittedly admirable skill set, either. That shit is hard, but learnable given time. Between everyone here, they can get by.

What Tiny brings to the table is _gumption_.

She isn't running from things, isn't held back by the past like a snake with its tail caught under a rock. She isn't worried about what was or whatever happened before they met, could probably give less than half a damn about who they are and what they have done. She just keeps going. Endlessly, relentlessly. She works, she progresses, and there's a solidness there that reminds Abraham of desert mountains jutting proud as all hell against desert winds.

Tiny doesn't talk. Tiny _does._

As he watches, her eyes drag back to a single, indistinguishable spot in the underbrush, then darts back to him. Lord knows it ain't clear as the hand signals he used to use with his squad when he was on one of his tours of duty, but fuck if it ain't some sort of signal. There's something there she's alerting him to.

He grins, but Tiny has already blocked him out. That single-minded determination shows through as she shifts in the new direction and parts the brush.

Abraham laughs at the sight.

It's a road, the first honest sign of civilization since they left that ruined settlement. The asphalt is cracked and worn by erosion, and the forest has grown up right to the very edge of it, but it's unmistakable a little country two-lane. If he stares down to his right, he can see it stretch beyond yonder yet, a sprinkling of cars somewhere along the way.

"It's about time we got done playing Moses and the Israelites," Abraham states cheerfully, stalking out onto the pavement. Something flashes in his memory as his joints adjust to the harder terrain, less giving than the forest floor. A long forgotten memory of his first leave after active duty, boots on the tarmac after being away for so long.

His grin grows. At least this time he ain't gotta shave his beard, and the lack of wind chapped everything is a bonus.

"Too loud," Tiny states eventually, the muscle in her neck jumping again. She stares at him when she says it, and he doesn't think Tiny gets that it's weird as all hell to look at someone like that. Like you can see straight into their damn soul.

"In my experience, communication is key to a successful mission."

She stares some more, focus unwavering even as the others come through around then. Heads swivel and twist as they orient themselves to their new surroundings. His group, it seems, shares the same sort of relief that he had at seeing signs of humanity after fucking weeks -months?- in the wild. Among them, scattered dogs weave around, closer now but still so wary.

A mutt brushes by her leg on its way past, the merle coated one that seems to stick around more than any others.

Her impassive face turns away, and Maly begins to walk in the direction of the cars in the distance as a familiar presence saddles beside him.

"Have a nice little chit-chat?" she asks, and there's no heat. No tension. It's just a passing question.

Abraham turns his smile toward her.

"Yah. Something like that."

Because Tiny doesn't talk. Tiny _does_. And that behavior right there was practically a whole conversations worth of 'Fuck right off.'

* * *

There's a walker in the trunk Maggie Greene opens, and its hair is the color of sun-bleached summer straw.

It's a sluggish beast, its movements slow and drained as it struggles to sit up towards her, dessicated muscle skirting under the too-dry skin. Its hand and feet are bound by rags, mouth gagged by a torn strip of cloth, and Maggie knows that all these little clues tell a story about how the living became the dead.

But the story of this woman's fall doesn't really mean much to Maggie. The walker shouldn't mean anything at all, if she tells it true, but it has sun-bleached straw hair and cheekbones high on its face that must have been cherubic once. Its eyes are filmed over in the same murky grey that the walkers all share, bloodshot and hemorrhaged around irises, but they must have shined a shade close to her own green at some point. It could have smelled of honeysuckles and dust, once, instead of acrid metallic rot.

Her sister used to smell like that.

She used to hide in the honeysuckle bushes that lined their home and the only way Maggie could find Beth was by the shine of her pale hair. It would be wild and tangled by the time she worked her out of them, and Beth, oh, she used to smile like the sun, her breath made sweet by the nectar of the blossoms, cheeks flushed red and eyes sparkling like stars. The smell would cling to her like a second skin, just as much a part of their home as the walls or floor. Their Pa would ask if he had fathered a blossom instead of a girl.

The grief and homesickness washes over Maggie, through her, flooding her bones and swirling under her skin until they fill her lungs and steal her breath away. It's too slow to be a danger, and without the threat, she can't bring herself to do much more than stare, just for second remember how things were -

A leather-jacket clad figure leans over the side of the trunk, arm outstretched, and casually slumps over on top of the walker. The creature hisses behind its gag before its face - and all subsequent noise - is obscured by the thick coat. A half a heartbeat more and the whole walker stills.

Maggie stares, not registering.

Slowly, ever so slowly, she starts to figure it out as Maly's boots scrabble for traction on the side of the car. She's too short to bend over and reach in, and the walker is obviously dead now, but the two aren't adding together.

Uncomprehendingly and with growing alarm, Maggie watches Maly's emaciated form squirm around the trunk. With a guttural grunt, the smaller woman finally wedges the better part of her weight out again and tilts so her body can slide out of the vehicle. Vaguely, it registers that there is a penknife deep in the walker's eye, driven in by...by…

...by the weight of a body slumping on top of it.

Maggie stares at Maly, who notices her almost not at all. There's tiny fast-food salt and pepper packets bitten between her teeth, side by side with a fat, black pouch of take-out soy sauce. Her frame wouldn't support a good, strong blow from the edge of the trunk so Maly just….threw herself in.

"Maggie, Maly?" Glenn calls softly, just enough to be heard and no more. "What is it?"

Maggie has no earthly idea.

The more she looks at Maly, the less she understands. There's a bungee cord hung around her neck, bouncing around as she moves, and a bunch of zip-lock bags half crammed in one of her pockets. There's a bundle of tampons in their wrapper that damn near fall out of her pocket as she rifles around the body, inspecting it.

Scavenging it, Maggie finally grasps.

With a soft huff through her nose, Maly reaches leans forward and tips over again, making her way toward the pant pockets of the corpse. Her own skeletal fingers probe inside, and after a moment, pull out a tiny packet from within that crinkles in the hot afternoon air. She brings it forward to her face, squinting against the light as she reads the print on the front.

Advil Cold and Flu Tablets, from what Maggie can see.

"Maggie?" Glenn calls again, but closer this time.

Maggie tears her gaze away from the sight before her, focusing on Glenn. His brows don't furrow, not like Pa's used to, but rather his eyes are wide and searching her own. He's concerned, bless his heart, and he reaches for her without thinking about it.

"What?" she asks, forgetting the question in the first place. Her mind is still stuck on Maly, condiments in her mouth as she loots a corpse.

"You had this look on your face," Glenn says. "What was in the trunk?"

Maggie stares into his eyes, so earnest and caring, and feels a rush of love run through her. She loves him so, so much.

"Just a body." she replies. "It'll be alright."

It will be.

* * *

How Maly acts doesn't always readily make sense.

What she scavenges, how she moves, the way gives and tells that she has; not many of them seem reasonable or justified. Even when he was a sheriff and the world was a civilized place, Rick thinks that reading her would have been hard. There's something in her that's just so slightly off from the norm, a path gone a bit to the left instead of trodding along a familiar way. It could be isolation that made it that way, could be trauma, but Rick is starting to think that it's just kinda always been like that for her.

"And the pepper packets?" Carol grills Maly, who edges slightly further away. It's almost unnoticeable, but Maly is even more uncomfortable around Carol than any other person. With Michonne she is what could be almost considered polite, Abraham she's damn near dismissive with, but Carol? Carol she's aware of. Knows where the other woman is anytime she's within shouting distance.

Maybe it's because when he said don't ask, just do, Carol took that to mean don't ask for permission, which is about right. But then the matron took to gleaming every ounce of available information she could from Maly at every opportunity.

Never let it be said that Carol lets any sort of resource go to waste, Rick thinks.

"Digestive aid," Maly pushes out, slowly and enunciated so each syllable comes out its own phrase. 'Di-ges-tive ai-d' instead of one smooth word like anyone else makes.

"Anti-inflammatory," she adds clunkily after an awkward pause, far too harsh on the 't' sound.

"The soy sauce?" Carol asks, moving onward in what Rick can only assume is a mental checklist of almost every item Maly has gathered.

He waits for the answer, used to the long pauses by now. They aren't following the road, per-say, but they are walking adjacent to it. He can glimpse it, sometimes, weaving in and out of sight on one side, the sounds of the river they followed up occasionally doing the same at a much, much rarer interval. At this point, the river is more of a creek anyway.

The seconds tick on to minutes, and usually, even at her pace, Maly would have spoken by now. But her voice remains silent, and when he glances at the two of them, the shorter is looking off into the distance without word.

Which isn't unusual, but it makes no sense why she would do it now.

"Maly? Why the soy sauce?" Carol asks again, her tone switched into something far less demanding and almost coddling.

Maly flicks her eyes to her, aware, as always, exactly what spot she's standing in, but she doesn't say a word more She just turns her gaze forward and picks speed, outpacing them in a quiet series of elongated strides.

Carol's face tightens as she watches the figure go, lips pursed in that way she gets.

"I guess she filled out her quota of words for the day," she states after a moment, glancing back at Rick.

For his part, Rick gazes levely back at her, eyebrow quirked.

"You do tend to demand quite a few from her."

"I want answers," Carol says simply. "Besides, if I asked a hundred questions each day, she'd find a way to answer them all with one or two words each, and a hundred words isn't much at all."

"Maybe not."

"What? You think I'm pushing too hard?" Carol asks in a voice that seems to suggest that the idea is a bit ridiculous.

A bit of dust from his beard tickles his nostril, and Rick sniffs to dislodge it, taking the moment to think. If he's honest, he doesn't think it matters much.

"Ain't for me to say."

"Well, she's not saying much, so someone should probably try."

"She said some. And you picked up what she was saying. In my opinion, that works."

For a long moment, Carol just stares at him.

"Rick," she states, the tone completely changed. "Did you set it up so we're socializing her?"

"That's sorta a side effect," he answers honestly. He honestly thought what Eugene said had merit. They were starving, desperate, and Maly knew how not to be. Forcing it out wouldn't work, and would take too much energy. If the group could learn by watching, if they could learn to get by in the way Maly did, they could survive.

Maybe they're still tired. Everyone is exhausted, and the heat is oppressive and damn near painful. They still need shelter, need more than this, but they have water. They have food. They can keep going for a long while yet.

And Rick isn't sure they would have had that without Maly.

"Pretty convenient side effect, Rick," Carol tells him.

He sniffs again, this time raising his hand to swipe at his nose. Damn beard.

"Yah, well, she's a pretty convenient person," Rick answers.

He doesn't look at Judith. Or Carl. Both fed two full meals today.

He doesn't have to, not when the group around them can see the dogs and the woman walking with them for themselves.


	22. Soy Sauce, Birds, and Understanding

There's a packet of sauce in Maly's pocket, weighing in at the standard .2 ounces, and taking up a maximum of two square inches. By all means, it is small and lightweight, but the burden of it sits on her mind as her fingers rhythmically scratch at the textile covering of her new bungee cord.

She had debated what to use the cord for, at first. It could be used to secure her things and compress them tighter in her pack. She could use it to stretch her small tarp over her hammock more securely. She could fashion a slingshot from it, use it to make an even more efficient snare, unbraid it and use it for line that could go towards fishing or more easily carrying a multitude of items on her person. For now, it settles tight around her jutting hip bones, keeping her pants from slipping and tripping her as she moves, but it could be a thousand other things. It's useful. Necessary.

Soy sauce is…

Soy sauce.

Her mind blanks when she tries to register why she picked it out. It doesn't harm anything, didn't take any more effort to scavenge. It sat beside the salt and pepper packets in a chipped and dusty cup holder, coated with a thin layer of dirt from the cracked window, but sealed and safe for consumption. It was a mindless thing to grab, one she didn't have a use for.

She doesn't know why she took it.

It….has sodium. Sodium is good when she's losing minerals in her sweat. It's a necessary nutrient, but one she got plenty of in her diet. She wasn't lacking in her salts, and by itself, it didn't serve much of a purpose.

But she has it, here, in her pocket.

Blankly, she picks at the fabric of the cord around her waist, the fibers catching on her rough, calloused palms. She likes the feeling of it, the drag and release of the textures meeting, and the tension that builds to be released. Again and again, she runs her fingertips over it as she marches, mind occupied by soy sauce and why.

She doesn't know.

Just like she doesn't know why she gave the turtle eggs to Michonne. There were nearly forty in all, soft things in smooth, leathery shells. Sixteen she kept for herself and the dogs, their pasty golden yolks brilliant against their milky whites, the shell rubbery against her teeth but still edible. More importantly, they were nutrient rich and caloric in a way that nature rarely provided. If she had kept them packed in salt they would have lasted her days.

They lasted the locusts one single meal.

Walnuts were calorie dense and rich in fatty acids, but it was a handful and a poor trade, unless it wasn't a trade at all and Michonne cluing her into the nearby food source. But they both gathered there that day so it didn't make sense. It didn't make sense for Michonne to hand over her meager portion and it didn't make sense to hand over the eggs. It was -and remains- an illogical action. A waste of resources that could have been stretched farther and lasted them longer should they have been more thoughtfully allocated.

But they weren't.

Granted, it did little harm. Maly's bag is still heavy on her shoulders, weighed down by goods from the river. As always, the weight will shrink rapidly, but she has enough to last, and the loss wasn't detrimental so much as it was useless.

Useless, like the soy sauce packet.

A pressure in her head grows, a gathering between her ears until it coalesces between her eyes. It feels foreign and awkward, like the lodging in her throat that comes and goes like a phantom illness and just as unpleasant. She squints her eyes against the growing breeze and licks the back of her foul tasting teeth.

Throwing the soy sauce would be useless. Keeping it is useless. There's no reason for or against it.

It just...is.

"Why the soy sauce?" the woman of still waters asks in her head, and Maly wonders just for a moment. Why is the soy sauce? Why does it exist? What purpose does it serve, now? Why keep it, why have it, what use can it serve?

The pressure between her eyes throbs, and Maly winces at the sensation. She doesn't have the energy to waste on this, doesn't have time to spare for why. It is what it is, she decides, and what it is is soy sauce. No more, no less. She doesn't know why she took it, and she doesn't need to.

The headache doesn't fade, though, and the question lingers in her head like the taste in her mouth as she moves her head to scan the area, running her fingers over the cord. It's bright, even as late as it is, but the sun is no longer straight ahead. The shadows are scarce, too many objects casting their cloaks in all directions at ever so slight of a tilt. No immediate threats present themselves, nothing but the dogs, heads sunk low as they move. A few glance curiously back at her, more attentive than they usually would be to her actions.

Maly stares back. The dogs, she knows, are waiting for something from her. As to what, she does not know.

She looks up.

Above, in the canopy, a brilliant flash of red flickers for an instant as a cardinal comes to roost, tucking itself in a juniper, bright scarlet against the dark green. More hidden are the starlings, their muted colors harder to pick out in the neutral colors of the trees, and the further she walks the more she sees. Blackbirds carefully eye them as they pass beneath, chickadees and jays quiet as the group moves on. The birds observe their passing silently, at odds with their usually vocal protests.

Maly flexes her throat, swallowing past the ambient, resting stiffness of it. Her sight flicks to the sky -mostly clear, blue interspersed with soft puffs of white, and back to the trees as her legs move onward. The bugs drone on and on and the heat is relentless, but the birds are still in their perches.

She sets her teeth just so, tongue shifting, and constricts the muscles of her chest. Air rushes up and out as she flexes her tongue and lips, tittering like a chickadee. Long and song like, it comes out as clear as she meant it. A solid Fee-bee-bee.

The birds cock their heads curiously, and a few sing back at her, but none take wing on the pleasant winds.

Maly looks to the sky again, then back to the birds. Chickadees are territorial and responsive. They should be coming closer to inspect the source of the sound.

She tries again, another round of fee-bee-bee, fee-bee-bee. When it merits the same lacking response, she switches to a sharp seet sound. A challenging noise that usually incites agitated excitement, but now warrants only soft protests from the tiny birds. She switches species entirely this time, aiming for the shrill chatter of the scrub-jays, all hard notes and crisp sound. Still, none take wing.

"What. The fuck."

Slowly, Maly tilts her head downward, tearing her eyes from the birds. Her first instinct is toward the dogs, who still glance at her, but now she understands why. Eventually, though, her sight turns to the loudest of all her company; the people.

It's the woman most often in Red's company who spoke, the one with her hair in pigtails and a machete at her hip. She's staring at Maly with her mouth slightly open, shapely eyes wide and questioning.

Maly stares back for a moment. She isn't sure of the statement. Isn't sure what response to give.

So she doesn't give one, moving on.

Only, when she casts her eyes around, it seems a great number of the group are starring in a similar fashion, halting their progress to look at her. She feels the force of their gazes on the back of her neck, prickling up and down between her shoulder blades like a multitude of heavy weights.

Maly stills herself, unsure.

"What in Sam hell was that, Tiny?" Red asks, off to the left of the woman who spoke before. His voice is too loud, as always, filling her ears like too much liquid and adding to the pressure between her eyes. She doesn't like it, the sensation or the noise.

"Were you...were you talking to the birds just now?" Glenn asks from somewhere to her right. There's something about his tone, a hesitancy, but Maly can't find the words inside her to explain that birds don't have organized language before somebody else is speaking.

"Can you teach us how to talk to the birds?" the teenager -Carl- interjects excitedly.

"She wasn't talking to the birds," Michonne says.

"She was was doing something with them," The woman of still waters states.

"Carol," Michoone calls, turning to the other woman, and Maly blinks because it is strange to have a name for the woman. " Please don't tell me you think she was talking to birds."

"She was doing something," Carol insists.

"Sounds like she's got one stuck in her throat," the pig-tailed woman adds, and Red laughs at the comment, loud and full and it's so noisy. There's too much noise. They will attract the dead, and they can't afford that with what is coming.

"She just makes bird calls," and oh, there is a voice she has not heard in a while. It is Father Gabriel, and when she looks, he is staring at her in that strange way he has. Nervous and scared, like he wants something. "Leave her be."

Maly thinks that has a slim chance of happening. She would settle for them being quiet.

"Never heard her make one before now," Carol states, and it itches at Maly, the noise. There are more voices joining and she's aware of each one. A winding sensation sinking around her chest as the pressure builds.

"It was before you came to the church."

"And you, what? Heard her through the doors you hid behind?"

Maly grits her teeth, raising her hands. Too loud, too loud.

She covers her ears, palms clasped tight around the giving cartilage, until she can't hear their voices. Her sore head floods with the thrumming boom of silence, a vibrating white noise of nothingness.

Ahead, Meatsack glances back at her yet again, bumping noses with some muddy purebred looking thing she has never seen before, a new collection in her growing menagerie. In turn, it looks at her as well, and her head throbs because she knows now. She knows.

Maly grits her teeth and starts walking, her pace double what it was before.

The thrumming silence gains a beat, a steady rhythm that corresponds with her steps, and her fingers pick at the spiky, sloppily shorn hair around her head instead of the bungee around her waist. Her eyes scan the world around them as she goes forward, outstripping the group until the locusts leave her vision entirely and there is nothing but rough bark and shrubbery ahead.

It lasts a few seconds at most, movement in her peripheral making her slide her eyes toward it. She spies devil blue, icy cold and hard against the flushed red of sun-scorched skin. His lips move.

She keeps walking, listening to the thrum.

Another movement, and it is Michonne, then Squirrel Killer. Michonne looks at Rick and her mouth is moving too, more useless words that lead to noise that Maly knows is too loud. It's all too loud, only going to get louder, and the pressure of her palms against her ears increases even though it makes the headache worse.

Squirrel Killer looks at them, then at her, but his lips don't move.

He just stares as she walks, matching his stride to hers, his eyes narrow, lips thinning into a line before looking to where Maly looked, catching sight of the mutts. He looks back at her, hand raised to point at the newest mutt.

Maly stares blankly back.

His arm drops for a moment, and his brow furrows further. His lips twist into a scowl, the grime on his skin collecting in the folds on his cheeks as he twists his head to look up in the trees, staring at their branches, before turning back to her. Again his hand lifts, his thumb jerking toward the bird-filled foliage.

She stares back for a moment, flicking her eyes heavenward for the briefest of seconds before bringing it back again.

Silently, he copies the movement before locking gazes. For a period, he does nothing else, and Maly moves ever onward while he stares at her. But in time, his gaze shifts, and he looks to the meat-pack again, roaming about with a sort of stilted unsureness, and haltingly he turns to her, the expression smoothed from his face.

In stuttured, unpracticed movements, he cocks his head to the side ever so slightly, the way the dogs do when they question.

In answer, Maly glances to the empty sky, the bird-filled branches, and tilts her face until her nose is pointed into the growing breeze before looking back.

Squirrel Killer stares, repeating her motions once, twice, three times. On the fourth, he missteps, narrow eyes snapping open as he turns his head into the wind. The crossbow slung across his back jumps at the sudden halt, and Maly stills as he rapidly glances toward the birds and the empty skies before eventually landing on her once more.

Slowly, he takes his hand and pats the canteen slung on his hip, and Maly struggles as she stares at the metal container. It's filthy on the outside, but the inside she knows is kept clean and crisp as to not contaminate the water.

Sudden understanding strikes, and she glances back up at him. He stares back unmoving, and she pointedly drags her eyes away from his water bottle to the gallon sized jugs on Red's pack before facing him again.

He follows her lead, face grim as he turns toward her, and she understands that he finally gets it. The birds aren't taking flight to feed or forage because, right now, finding a solid roost is more important. No taunting or goading will move them, which means that they are saving strength for something big. Likewise, the meatpack is trusting her to lead them to shelter as she's done in the past, and keep glancing back because they know what's coming.

Watching Squirrel Killer before her, she knows he finally grasps the magnitude of the storm coming too.


	23. Blown by the Wind

The wind picks up before the storm starts, and then for one moment, stops blowing altogether, leaving the air heavy and hot like a wet blanket around her already too hot shoulders. The sound of her thumping heart and cacophonous breaths pulses inside her aching head as she hustles. There's just no time, not when she knows without checking that the bugs have stopped their summer song and even the wind stops to hold itself still in the wake of what is to come.

Then, a trickle. A drop. Then spattering.

Within seconds of that first drop, it's pouring from the sky in a summer shower. For a scant few moments, the sun still shines gloriously overhead, promising that this is a passing spray. But the sun lies, and the birds crouch low in their branches as the sprinkling becomes a heavy downpour.

Maly's loaded form moves from a slight hindrance to flat out burdensome as her clothes quickly become waterlogged, her water-resistant pack proving itself to be just that; resistant, but not foolproof. Liquid seeps in and she feels it gathering at the bottom of the sack, every ounce multiplying as the rain continues, becoming pounds as she is drenched. The thick fabric of her pants slow her movements, chafing at her thighs, rubbing her already heat rash stricken skin raw. She can feel the fresh prickle and sting of it distantly, somewhere just ahead of her constantly aching bones, but far behind the pain of her headache.

She keeps going, pushing herself onward. She sucks her breathes with all the strength she has, struggling to pull them in from behind he damp fabric of her mother's krama. It feels like drowning, like being waterboarded, but she can't pull it down and cover her ears. It doesn't matter anyway. Her sole focus is shelter.

It isn't her who finds it, though. Someone shouts something so loud and close that she flinches from the noise of it even as the words are lost inside her brain, tumbling into nonsensical syllables as she scouts for a outcropping, a cave, _anything_.

A hand grabs her, and Maly throws herself back from it in a rush of adrenaline, bodily hauling her weight in the opposite direction. The action pries her palms from her ears, and the rush of the rain is deafening after the silence. She can't think through it, fumbling for a knife as her pulse thuds in her throat. It must be a hoard they ran into and never noticed because the dogs cannot scent in this wind, and her eyes were not keen enough to spy them through the rain. She couldn't hear because there's too much noise. It's too loud, and her head hurts.

This feeling she knows. This one she can name a thousand times over, even here, stumbling in the mud.

She is _afraid_.

"Maly!"

Maly looks up, and Carol looks down at her instead of the corpse she was expecting. The crows feet in the corner of her eyes crinkle as she squints through the downpour, her empty hand outstretched towards the slighter woman.

"Daryl found a barn! Come on!"

Maly doesn't know a Daryl, though. She doesn't know anybody here, not really. They are just strangers and she's scared because there's so much noise and so many people. And people...people are gambles. They can say anything and do anything. They're dangerous, like the storm, and she just wants everything to be still and quiet.

She keens out a breath, choking on the moisture in her scarf, face impassive and unmoving.

But somewhere beyond Carol's figure, beyond the storm and Maly's fear, a member of the meatpack yowls. Maly throws herself toward the noise because she is afraid and overwhelmed, but she can trust animals to be animals. She can trust the meatpack to know what's up.

So she scrambles forward, slipping in the slick mud as she ducks underneath the arm towards the dogs, and follows the pack until, quite suddenly, she's passing through an entrance and the rain stops pounding into her. The pack is a single minded beast, and she only has eyes for frantically scanning her new surroundings as they mill about, doing the same with their noses that she does with her eyes. Inspecting this strange place for danger, for a threat.

All the while the rain pours down, thunderously loud on the wooden roof. Maly can hear voices, always voices, creeping in above the din of her riotess heartbeat and explosive breaths.

Quiet, she thinks as she tries to muffle her gasps, sucking air through her nose and clamping her mouth shut. Quiet.

In defiance, the air rends itself apart in a flash of light and roars with the sound of thunder.

Maly's heart thuds.

Somewhere, she knows that the rain and the thunder cover the sound of people, the sound of her. Somewhere, she knows it is easier to hide in the din instead of the quiet, but that part is suffocated, muffled like her laborious breaths. More important is the need to be away, to count, to be hidden and safe.

She drags herself to the farthest corner of the barn, bracing her back to a splintering wall, and tries to deny her need for air as she picks at her belt. Her eyes jumps from dog to dog -some eighteen in number now, though she does not understand how- and then from locust to locust. Everything is accounted for.

She slumps; lets her weighted, soaking bag drag her down. The rain pounds the roof and the meatpack snuffles, glancing at her now and again as her eyes bounce around and around the barn. There's hay in some places, old and molding, and long abandoned horse stalls. There's a rock jutting from the earth beneath her, sharp and uncomfortable as the air rushes in and out of her nose.

It's too loud.

She raises a hand from her belt to muffle the noise, pressing a palm over her mouth and nose. It's harder than ever to breath, her lungs burning from the effort it takes to pull oxygen through wet cloth pressed firmly against her face, but the noise fades fractionally. Enough for her to still herself. To wait and watch.

Lightning cracks across the sky outside, turning the world white and blue. Thunder rolls.

Maly becomes stone.

She's aware of things in this state, aware of more than her normal body could ever process. Every detail of her surroundings trickles through, even as her vision greys at the edges and her head throbs

The haze in the corner of her sight fades in time, though. How much, she is unaware. That's not important. Not right now. Not when she has to _watch_.

At first, the a few try and come closer. Presumptuous strangers whose names flicker like failing lights in her mind. The tall one with the sword stares at her, walking closer, and where she goes the man with Lucifer's frozen eyes is never far behind. The man who punched her, the ones who held her, who were so slow and loud.

But a hand carrying a crossbow halts her progress halfway across the structure. Squirrel Killer doesn't say a word to the katana wielding woman, just gestures with his free arm to a stall far on the other side with a parting glance toward Maly's corner. His eyes skate over the pack nestling there, eighteen lean bodies tense and coiled, all as silent as the grave as they paw and pace and _watchwatchwatch_.

Maly takes comfort in that. Those stinking, half-feral hounds with teeth and claws. Not safe, but understandable.

She watches as Red and his gang hunker down in a free stall, barring their teeth and shaking the water off them. Watches them open their bags and sort through thing, already cleaning some of their weapons out to dry anything that may have gotten moist. Smart, but they go about it raucously, with smiling faces. They are pleased, it seems. Content.

But not warm.

It must be cool, or else someone is being indulgent, because Maly smells the sparks before there even is a flame. It's Glenn and the green eyed woman, with the shorter, squatter female. They huddle over twigs on the ground, shaving flakes off a starter with clumsy hands and striking at the starter to ignite them. Yet, they don't protect the flakes from the draft, and the pile of magnesium blows away in the drafts that sneak between the wooden slats of the walls. The woman sniper next to them whispers something, and the sound grates like barbed wire down exposed nerves.

In a stall, Carl and the baby huddle down. The teen with the gimp leg makes a nest in the hay beside them, and they speak. She can't hear the words past the howling of the wind and rain, but she sees their lips moving. Can read the syllabus tumble down from their mouths, could catch them if she wanted.

Behind them all, at the far end of the barn, the woman of still waters stands tall, head unbowed, watching.

Their eyes meet for the briefest of seconds before they turn away from each other.

Her muscles begin to ache at some point, and Rick and Michonne come out of their stall, followed by a quiet Squirrel Killer. They walk over to where the small fire has been lit, the light too-bright against the encroaching darkness of the barn, and Maly's body betrays her, trembling from the wet and cold.

She ignores the shivering.

Time skips, stutters, and flutters sideways. The minutes and hours she reclaimed lose themselves in the steady onslaught of wind and water, and everything boils down to being unnoticeable while noticing everything.

Her body keeps trembling.

Rainwater drips down her hair into the back of her jacket, slipping from her krama down her collarbones and into her shirt. Her pants stick, heavy and burdensome against her legs. The pointed stone beneath her seat digs further and further, bruising even through the material covering her. All this, though, is nothing. The shaking, the cold, the discomfort. Nothing.

It's the noise -the pounding rain, the creaking barn door, the start of soft murmuring, the incredible boom of thunder- that makes her still. It's blinding, in a way. In this downpour she cannot hear the groans of the approaching dead or the footsteps around her. She can't smell anything beyond wet, molding hay. It cuts her awareness down to line of site.

And that's not enough.

But it is what it is, and Maly will work with what she has. She will wait and watch until her other senses return, until she can get somewhere safe, up off the ground. Here, in the center of the meatpack, she will be a sentry and guard her life. Nothing has changed.

Her jaw aches from clenching her teeth to keep them from chattering, but even as the conversation and murmurs die down, Maly holds fast. One by one she observes shifts be set up for the watch, sees other people drift off peacefully. She doesn't understand how they can do it, not when there's so much noise. The barn door keeps creaking and slamming, groaning on its hinges-

-Maly's eyes glue themselves to the door, and she sucks in a breath, holding it silent inside herself. It's dark outside, too dark to see. But the dead never cared about light, always more active at night. It's why she didn't move when the stars were out, even during the hottest days.

A flash of light ignites the world outside, a blinding blue-white, just as bright as day. It illuminates everything from the whirling tree tops being ravaged by the winds, to the gaping maw of the rotting corpse reaching through the chained doors and the hoard behind it.

Maly doesn't think. Doesn't pause to consider that the storm and rain ruined the dog's ability to scent just like it did her. She doesn't think about the cold settled into her very marrow, or the way the thunder is loud enough to shake the barn. She just thinks that she needs to survive, needs to keep going, needs to keep the dead out.

She throws her weight upward, staggering and collapsing back down onto a dog. It yelps as she crumples bodily on top of it, her legs tingling from holding position too long, and squirms from under her. She has the fleeting impression that the mutt is warm before its stray paw catches her in the cheek, grinding her face into the dirt.

She lifts her face upward, arms scrabbling to drag herself forward. Her legs are numb and full of pin-and-needles by turn, refusing to move. The noise is so loud, the dead slamming against the door-

"Maly?" someone asks sleepily.

And Maly, Maly doesn't think. Maly doesn't work out the sounds, doesn't feel the shape of them, doesn't try. She just...does.

" _The door! **The dead are at the door!**_ "

There's a flurry of motion and a flood of noise that comes at her call. A chain reaction goes off and then the sniper woman is throwing herself bodily at one side of the opening, followed by Glen, and then Carol. The locusts begin to pile on it as Maly forces herself through the agitated pack toward a post. Anything to help her get up, to make her legs work.

A hand snatches her upper arm, a body swerving around the snapping mouth of an upset dog. Maly whips around to look at Michonne, who offers her a single, inexplicable nod as she lifts Maly from the moldering hay and dirt.

She doesn't let go, either. Her arm is a weight that grounds Maly as she stumbles forward on numb, unfeeling legs. The storm rages, rain and wind ripping at the old wood barn. Voices cry out, the dead groan, and even the pack snarls in the tumultuous atmosphere. There's so much noise. Too much.

But Maly keeps going.

She pushes, shivering and in pain, into the mass of locusts, heaving her weight until she slides between the others and can brace her entire weight against the door. Light flashes and the unforgiving winds rip through the gaps to chill her further. Her head throbs a ruined hand paws through the gap, a rotting arm snaking behind it. In the brief light, she can see the tendons that dangle from it like parasitic worms, the grey flesh a stark contrast to pale bone.

She pushes harder, feels the crush of another human being against her back, body warm against the chill. The splintered wood of the door bites into her palms and all she knows is the roar of the wind like an oncoming train and the desperate desire to live.

The light fades, thunder rolls. There's a brush of something furry against her shin, a snapping noise like bone breaking and flesh tearing.

The door slams shut as the locusts brace against it.

They live.

They live.

* * *

The next morning, there's a stranger kneeling in the dirt of the barn, and the bone fragments of a human arm scattered in the hay around the meatpack.

It's quiet.


	24. The Choices We Make

Maly feels... exhausted. It's like too much of her was used, and she's incapable of pushing more. It leaves her dozing in the dirt, unable to sleep properly, but too worn to begin the day at dawn. Her body is too heavy to rise up and hang the hammock in the rafters, and the energy to stand or do anything at all is out of her reach. She's spread too thin, scraped across reality like a film of oil across her fingertips. The thought of all that wasted time makes a knot appear in her lungs, something ugly aimed at herself within.

The storm has taken its toll.

But she is breathing, capable of movement and no stranger with the price she has to pay.

Still, it is odd to see others leave before she does. Weirder still to see them return with one more than they left with.

The green-eyed woman -Maggie, something inside her whispers- says the stranger's name is Aaron and his words jumble loosely around Maly's head as she stares at him, unable to look away.

"I wish," she catches in there somewhere, "We could call it something else. Audition makes it sound like we have a dance troop, but that's only Friday nights."

His lips flutter weakly upward, a feeble mockery of a smile. The man's pack sits in the sniper's hands, his weapon already handed over to Rick, and he's supposedly alone. That much she gathered from the hasty introduction before she finally lifted her head from the back corner of the barn, too busy sorting looted goods from the crushed corpses of the miraculously immobilized dead outside.

"And it's not a camp. It's a community. I think that you all would make valuable additions," he continues, but Maly's too stuck on looking at him to really put forth the effort of sorting the words.

The stranger is so _clean_.

The more she watches, the odder it is to her. He sticks out like a sore thumb amongst the locusts, clothes unburdened by travel dust and grime, skin smooth and unblemished. There are no stains on his shirt, no muck on his rain jacket, no hole in his clothes. Even his boots are comparatively neat, the rubber soles unblemished and the textile exteriors only spattered with fresh mud instead of caked stains.

He is immaculate, hair is light and curling, tufts gently shifting as he moves about instead of matted down by sweat and oil. The fingers on his hands are unswollen, the nail beds uncracked. He doesn't work with his hands, hasn't toiled away the days eeking out a living from the earth.

It doesn't make sense.

Maly shifts in her place, tired and worn from the night. Her head is stuck on the strangers' appearance, this aberration from the norm. A stray piece that has no cause or reason. The tender meat of her palms -raw from scrabbling in the dirt in an attempt to stand the night before- stings in a casual reminder of her foolishness as she braces her weight against the stall door to heft herself up.

Heeding it, she doesn't trip over the dog in front of her feet. She's aware enough. She knows where everyone is, can count the heads of the locusts and mutts alike. Everything she does is measured and weighed as much as she can.

This newest stranger is pale and not in the way that the woman of...the way that Carol is. It isn't just that he's Aryan. He's unburnt, face not reddened and burned, cheeks unblistered. As she approaches, errantly shoving a few mutts from her path, she notices that there's no sweat gathering at the collar of his shirt, either. The man's milky complexion is waxen and off, but healthy, and she can see no trace of the wilderness on him.

He's talking, still. Always with the words. A superfluous amount, even more noise than the locusts usually make. They itch at her ears and worm into her brain. His job...homes… Nonsense. All useless chatter, but the tone is different than the group's. Droning instead of full of inflections she can't sort.

Inflections she doesn't hear now, because the group is quiet. For once, they make no sound, content to let the stranger do it for them.

A coonhound mix huffs around the newcomer's shoes, and Maly shifts about the standing locusts to look at him from all angles she can, aware of the sniper handing a pack to devil eyes. To Rick.

"-Front pocket-" she hears, syllables slowly piecing together to form meaning. "There's pictures."

The back of the jacket has no stains either. There's no dirt or twigs from resting on the ground. No grass stains and there's creases in his pants. Purposeful ones. One's she hasn't seen in…

Maly's mind stutters as she reaches the side opposite from where she began. Hasn't seen in… in…

She doesn't know how many days it's been since. How many months or years.

Creases like that… this sort of cleanliness. It takes resources that aren't readily available any longer. They are luxuries, commodities which serve no purpose other than lines that draw the eye. It's the most wanton form of excess, a slap in the face of the way of life she knows.

She reaches out, needing to confirm it with more than one sense. Sight can be betrayed, fallible by nature. But if the clothes are as giving to the touch as they look, instead of stiff from being air dried…. If they have a scent of something other than river or pond…

Then there's electricity. Enough to waste on washing machines and dryers, like in that time she doesn't know how long ago.

"There's no way I could convince...you...to…." the voice above her trails.

Her fingers graze the flannel the man is wearing, the pattern vibrant and unmuddled. It's malleable against her digits, almost slippery with how smooth it feels, and drawing a few deep breaths through her nostrils isn't quite enough. The scent of moldy hay and her own heady odor overpowers anything she might smell at this distance.

She needs to get closer.

Maly goes to grab a handful and bring it to her nose, but the body wearing them jerks back from her touch. Reflexively, Maly ducks just out of reach at the quick action, eyes skittering upward toward the man, and their movements are accompanied by the sound of raised guns and flicked safeties.

Maly freezes, eyes darting around the barn.

But none of the weapons are pointed at her. Just the stranger.

Her gaze jumps from person to person, not comprehending the situation, until they finally rest on Rick, the closest to Maly and the stranger than anyone else. His own gaze is locked on the newcomer, his sidearm level and finger steady on the trigger, devil blue eyes shining.

With a cold, steely voice, one of the locusts finally speaks.

"Let her smell you."

* * *

Staring at the newcomer, gun raised to the man's chest to drop him if he so much as flinches wrong, Rick thinks that he's come a long way from who he used to be.

But, see, he's had to. Had to adapt, be harder. Had to learn.

He's done a whole lot of learning.

Before, he believed in a law laid down by governments run by people who had never walked the streets of his town, never seen the faces of the people he brought in or protected. He trusted these people he had never met and all their education to make the best decisions for entire populations of strangers that came from creeds and classes different from their own without any self-interest because that's what was right.

But it wasn't _human_.

Because human isn't right or wrong. Human just is, and part of being human is looking out for interests that pertain to the self and, by proxy, those people one surrounds themselves with. And the best interests of his group, of his family, can't be bought with pretty words that spew like so much shit from this Aaron guys' mouth. He's too nice, too clean, more so than even the residents of Terminus. All his talk about auditioning for a compound reeks of a trap, and this guy could be bait. Could be a red herring. Could be a scout.

It's not a good offer for the group, not without selfish interest. Rick's learned that the hard way, was taught that lesson by the Governor. By Terminus. By Shane.

Better, Rick thinks, to have one more man dead by his hand than a threat to his family.

But, see, here's another thing Rick has learned. This one is a little fresher in his mind, a new thing he just caught on to recently. It wasn't one beat into him. This one he started to pick up on back in an old church a few hundred miles away and months ago.

Maly Smith does things for a reason.

Maybe it's the isolation or some sort of trauma. Maybe it's because, as he began suspecting a while back, it's because she's on a spectrum that wasn't properly recognized back when the world had itself together, let alone in this new era. Maybe it's because she came from a different place, raised in a part of the country, in a culture he wasn't familiar with. Maybe it's all of the above.

Doesn't really matter.

What does matter is that every odd thing she has done has a cause, and usually it's a fairly good one. She keeps dogs because the dogs warn her, protect her, and work with her. She sets traps because she's small and not terribly strong. She never enters a place without perimeter checks because the outside can often reveal the inside. She picks plants because weeds are edible, carries tampons because they start fires well, and mimics birds with hyper-realistic imitations because fowl can tell her more than clouds.

So. If Maly Smith wants to try and smell a man?

 _You let her._

The man's eyes shutter, and he raises his empty hands into the air. It's easy, too easy, and everything about it reeks of a trap to Rick. It stinks of bait.

"I'm...sorry?" He asks, bewildered.

Ricks doesn't glance to the side because he doesn't need to. He can see everyone just fine from his peripheral vision, can tick them off one by one in his head. That's Sasha behind this Aaron, rifle up and pointed at the meat of his shoulder. That's Abraham with his own sidearm ready to deliver the classic tow torso, one head military kill. That's Michonne by the windows, Carol by the door, Glenn by his left, and Daryl at his back. Rosita, Eugene, Tara, Noah, Father Gabriel.

Maly.

Frozen Maly, still as a statue, crouched low and watching them all with blank eyes and a face hidden behind a dirty scarf, still looking like a mongrel mix of teenage boy and feral animal.

"Let. Her. Smell. You," Rick says again, drawing it out so there can be no mistake. For good measure, he gestures with his gun, twisting the butt of it in her direction.

Maly eyes the barrel that never twitches from its target.

"I'm," Aaron starts, but then he pauses, looks around. There's no help for him here, though. No aid to be found. "Alright. Okay. Just...take it easy."

Rick grunts and the sound make's Maly's eyes flick to his, briefly torn away from the weapon. This time he does look away from Aaron, if only to meet her glance head on. He thinks of last night, when Maly had slotted herself in a corner, hand over her mouth like she was going to asphyxiate herself. Thinks of how sometimes she doesn't get words or people, only base communication traded between guttural sounds and body language.

Rick jerks his chin, huffing out a sharp breath from his nose.

Maly darts forward like she can pluck the thoughts from his mind, snatching up a handful of the man's flannel from beneath his jacket and dragging it to her face so hard Aaron stumbles with the force of the grab.

Rick...won't lie. It's weird. He knows it's weird. It's life and death here, a possible mole or bait or trap in the form of a blond stranger, and there are guns drawn with the full intent to kill. In a second the barn could be filled with gunfire, something that would set the dogs off -set Maly off in that strange way she has while Judith wails in the background- and there could be a fresh coat of blood on the ground before the minute passes.

There's a reason for it, Rick knows. But also, Rick lived in a time not too long ago where people didn't inhale great whiffs from other people's clothes while more people pointed guns at one of them. It just wasn't done, because there was no need for it and also it was, and still is, weird.

Maly lets go, drops the scarf from around her face as she ducks back and stands, then violently sneezes.

Aaron winces, caught in direct direction of the blowback of it.

"Maly," Rick says, and she looks over, uncaringly running her sleeve under her nose. Her blank expression seems a world away when she lifts her head to his, working through whatever it is she just found. The column of her neck shifts like it always does before she speaks, her closed lips flexing as if warming up.

"Detergent," she begins in her halting way. "Washing machines. Dryers. Electricity. Enough to waste."

Rick narrows his eyes, his aim still on the man as his thoughts wander to the bag Sasha handed him, still dangling in his hands.

"If you have asked," the man says in that negotiator's tone. "I would have freely told you we have electricity. The community was built as an eco-friendly housing development-"

"If I wanted you to talk, _I would ask_. She's talking now."

The man obligingly, fearfully, shuts the hell up.

Rick turns his sight to Maly, who watches with that unnerving patience. He nods to her as he kneels to dig through the contents of the sack, but she tilts her head strangely, mouth twitching but not opening. Her head shifts ever so slightly to the bag he's beginning to palm his way through, then back to the stranger.

She looks back to Rick, blank-faced and eerie.

"His hands are smooth," she says. "He can't build traps. You can take his things and he'll die."

Rick freezes.

It is, he thinks, a little too late to remember exactly how Maly came to be with them. How they attacked first and talked later. How Maly and Father Gabriel were never direct threats, but peripheral ones that were content to stay away. They are here now, part of the group. They all survive together.

It's obvious, though, that on some level Maly is...projecting, he thinks. She sees a man being dragged in, his things being taken from him. She sees the brusqueness and the threat, and her own eyes keep darting to the guns in the room, as if expecting that they will turn on her too, at any moment. Maly's here alongside them, but she doesn't think she's with them.

Rick slowly turns to look at her, standing alongside the newcomer. It's a study in contrasts; the clean cut of the man against the grimy and muddled Maly, the emotion clear on his face versus the blankness on hers. He's terrified, trying to stay calm, but Rick can see the rabbit-like beat of his pulse underneath the skin of his neck. He looks toward Sasha and Maggie, like maybe the fleeting interaction they shared will mean anything.

On the opposite end, there is Maly, who has been alone for so long, away from people for so long, that even terrified and afraid she backed herself alone, into a corner.

She looks, Rick thinks not for the first or last time, exhausted.

He asks himself honestly which life he was to live.

And then he asks which ones he wants for his children.


	25. A Remembered Word

It's easy to see how the introduction to Aaron and Alexandria could have been wildly different, Michonne thinks.

In another time, in another place where things happened just a little bit differently, the group would have been run down. They would have been even more exhausted than they are now, beaten by the journey from Terminus to the north. That's just the way things are on the road; hard, all the goddamn time. In turn, it makes people hard in order to survive and that sort of transformation can leave people combative and steadfast in their desperation to live. Rick could have just as easily beaten Aaron and held him for interrogation than listened and planned.

Following along those lines, it would be easy to see the way that hope could spurn them to hasty actions. It's happened before. The lure of even just a taste of how things were, of a better quality of life, could have moved them at warp speeds to give in to whatever demands were said or implied. Maybe they would have done it in bad faith, given up their weapons with every intention of subverting the system and going back on their word, but they would have made a show of doing it in the first place. Things could have -would have- happened. Tensions would have risen. There would be friction and blood. She knows it.

As easy as it is to see how things could have gone sideways, though, Michonne acknowledges that they haven't. The group isn't hastily pushing forward. The road hasn't made them hungry and desperate.

They have food and they have water. They can wait and watch instead of forcing themselves onward.

"It's nice," Rick murmurs softly, his voice clear even now. He looks like a different man now, shaved and showered with the amenities found within those reinforced walls, his clothes cleaned.

"It's very nice," Michonne agrees absentmindedly. She licks her teeth yet again after she speaks, slick and smooth pearls that sit on gums as slippery as a blood wet sword. She can still taste the faint hints of mint on her tongue, a monumental change from the grit and sour aftertaste that lingered.

More than the walls, the relative safety, or the nostalgic domesticity inside Alexandria -with its pristine houses and strangely docile aura, it's the little things inside that have made the greatest difference. Actual toothpaste and floss after what seems like an eternity without them, hot water -oh God, hot water, a thing she has literally dreamed about- to wash away the grime and ache of wandering the woods. Clean clothes that aren't stiff from air drying, and ever so faintly sweet with the smell of cheap detergent.

She washed her hair. Washed it three or four times. She could have washed it forever.

"The people are soft, " Carol drawls, her sharp eyes scanning their surroundings. "When me and Daryl got our little tour inside the walls they seemed shocked that others could exist outside."

Michonne hums but doesn't disagree. Soft is a good word for the citizens inside. She has no doubts they stared equally as hard at every group that passed through, unused to having to face the gritty reality outside their haven.

(And that's another thing that could have been so different. Once upon a time, it may have been all or nothing, desperate to stay together, holding tight to physical proximity. But this time they knew nearby didn't always have to correlate with togetherness. They played it safe, played it smart. Rick and her went in first while the group remained outside the walls, haunting the edge of the forests just waiting for a signal. A scouting party inside to test the waters, and the largest mass outside the walls to check the perimeter and lay siege against the town if worst should come to be. Michonne remembers seeing genuine fright on some of the watchmen's faces as she first walked Alexandria's streets, their eyes wide as they stared down at whatever lay just outside.

Michonne has a three-pronged bet going on with herself. Abraham cuts an intimidating figure to experienced survivors, let alone green watchmen, and Sasha's intensity these days is something that can be felt from yards away. Foregoing that, the wild dogs gave her pause at first as well.)

"Soft is good," Rick answers. "Soft is easy to subdue if we need to."

"The armory is on the west side in one of the brick buildings. Got a peek at it when I was playing starving woman gawking at their pantry."

Michonne doesn't frown. It's not that she dislikes the information. It's good. It's useful, but…

"Do we need to?"

Rick glances at her, then back to the group as a whole. The majority of them sit around the clearing, almost unrecognizable from who they were before. Almost everyone is clean and grinning, genuinely delighted and refreshed after their own tours around the inside, receiving their own chance to scope the community inside and get the same spiel she and Rick received from the headwoman, Diana.

Safety and comfort, a home and community. In return, they teach this soft little community to survive, work to better the people and the standing of the town within.

Smart woman, that Diana. Not like a scientist or mathematician, but Michonne knows her type from the times before all this when she went to court and stood in debates as a lawyer. A socially savvy politician, leading by wit and skill. Not bad, not yet jaded and selfishly bitter. There's a spark there, a hint of a long lost judicial system that runs the place.

But no executive branch, not like is needed here outside, where there is no time for debates or long thoughts on a certain subject. Not like Rick.

"Sure as shit won't stand long as it is now," Abraham volunteers, red hair straight gleaming from its recent wash, a toothsome smile stretched across his face as he idly cleans the bore of his gun. "It's a neat little town, but everyone I saw was a peace-loving civvy down to their delicate little slippers."

"They were boat shoes, pendejo," Rosita groans as if this is something they have been bickering about for a while now. They probably have.

"There's sure as shit no boats and they have no laces. That's a goddamn slipper in my book."

"It was risky of them to bring us in, really risky," Glenn adds, ignoring the two. "Really risky. We could have done a lot of bad stuff. But…"

"But it's like they didn't realize that. Or recognize it. I asked about other groups, what the rules were and the infractions for that. They don't really have something set down for that. The worst they have done seems to be exile, and Diana seemed flighty about it, as if she saying she murdered them with her bare hands," Maggie says. Trust her to try and poke at the diplomacy behind the place.

"For people like tha'?" Daryl mutters, whittling away on some stick. "Might as well be murder. They ain't gonna last out here for shit."

Michonne pauses at the grumbling tone in his voice, looking a little harder at the redneck. He has a point, of course, but of the people in the group, Daryl is one of the three that seem most… dissatisfied with the community. He's still unbathed, quiet, and withdrawn. She's caught him staring at the walls more than once with some unnamable expression on his face, like it leaves a bad taste in his mouth, but also makes him uncomfortable and almost sad.

"I heard someone whining about vanilla cake mix," Sasha spits angrily. "Cake mix. That's their biggest problem. Too much of the same flavour of cake."

The sniper bares her teeth at the ground, jerkily tossing her sharpening stone to dirt. Her gloved hands flex once, twice, three times in her lap before stilling.

"They're stupid and won't last. I say we take what we want and leave. Hell, just mark it on a map and come back in a few months. It's neat and pretty, but by then this place will be like all the other ruins."

Concern stirs in Michonne's breast. Something is building in Sasha and it has been since Bob died. Something very close to breaking. Out here, in the wild, if it goes at the wrong time, it could cost lives.

But inside the walls…

"It doesn't have to go to ruins," Tara says in the silence that follows. "I mean, that's why we're here, right? Why they're trying to rope us in? If we did this, we could make it last."

"If they listen," Carol points out, tone indicating exactly how likely she thinks that is.

"But it's worth trying. I mean, it's a risk, but for us? It's a small one. They already showed us inside, and I know that Eugene already can draw a map of the streets from just having walked them-"

"Can you really?" Rick asks, surprised.

Eugene coughs, scratching awkwardly at the back of his neck. Michonne catches something about Dungeons, Masters, and worldbuilding but chooses not to think about that too hard. Rosita, however, coughs out an unsubtle ' _Nerd_.'

"-and the lady in charge at least seems to know that we have something they need," Tara continues. "The people are weird and kinda judgy, yeah, but. It's… inside is-"

"It's a place to live," Michonne finishes for her. "Not survive. This is a chance, what we've all been looking for. There's more to life than just eeking out a living day to day. Look at us. I mean it, look at us. This is a chance to have a safe spot, to not always be watching our backs, just barely getting by. We can do something here, have something better. If we stay outside in the wild, how long until we stop trying to to get along altogether? How long until we give up on society, on what humanity can be, on the possibility of something more?"

Silence greets her statement as the group ponders it over. A few, she knows, were already on her side, but others remained on the fence. There was a comfort in that for them, having reserve plans to simply take what they wanted in lieu of working together for it. It was the barest order of the wilderness, the certainty of the triumph of forceful domination.

But it wasn't them. It wasn't right.

"There's a chance. There's…." Carl states from his place in the shade of a great oak tree, his father's hat falling over his eyes. His sister bounces on his hip, drowsy in the hot sun. "There's hope."

Rick looks at his children for a long, long moment. Michonne wonders briefly what he sees there, what answer he find in the shape of those kids. Whatever it is, he nods and seems secure in it.

"Then we try."

Michonne smiles, pleased. Suddenly the future seems brighter. Beds with actual mattresses, a steady supply of food. Maybe they can grow things here. They can start stabilizing, get Sasha the help she needs, get everyone the help they need. They can begin to heal-

"Who's going to tell Maly? They sure seemed mighty flighty around the mutts n' she hasn't even gone inside yet."

Michonne's excitement recedes a touch. Maly. Maly who remained silent and sullen outside, blank-faced and bereft of words. The slight woman who seemed to endlessly pace deeper in the woods, gathering and watching. The person whose influence, Michonne suspects, allowed the group to play it so safe in the first place.

Dammit.

* * *

If she had the words, or the inclination, Maly could start a list of facts about this settlement. It would be neither good nor bad in nature, just facts about it as a whole.

If she cared, she would begin with stating that the list disregards the biggest and boldest fact; the walls, sturdy and sounds as they may be, are a physical manifestation of a willing ignorance gripped tight and held close. A construction for a dream instead of an action in reality.

She knows the use of walls. Maly is not stupid. She knows the reasons why they are useful.

She knows a lot of things about this place now. She's been watching it for days.

It's big. That can go on the list. It is no small community, no gathering of tents or ramshackled city. Instead, it is an entire neighborhood sheltered inside solid steel, nestled inside a metal shell that blanks out the world around it. Inside, from the tops of neighboring trees, she can see houses, immaculate despite all the ways they should not be, with hedges and lawns and things that jar her, stirring up an acid taste in her mouth. There's water inside, a large body that the unforgiving sun shines down on, sending tendrils of light arcing through the ornate trees within.

There are people, too. More than the group, all just as off as the one in the barn. A juxtaposition. A tilted fun-house picture on a wall. They walk and talk and smile on those leaf and litter free streets inside the wall, all too clean and too nice.

The sight is… something. It makes that acid on her tongue stronger; stirs something in between her collar bones that squirms its' way to her jaw. She clenches her teeth, breathes in, and keeps watching.

The sight, she finds, doesn't bother her as much as the noise.

She can hear them, here in the real world beyond those walls. She heard the sounds from within long before she did her first perimeter check, circling solid metal in search of imperfections and weaknesses. There were voices carried by the wind, faint and soft, mumbling words she didn't care to make out. Sounds almost like a squirrels squealing appalled her, rhythmic and staccato instead of quickly drawn short and wet. The high pitched 'Heeeee-hi-hi-hi' was alien and grating, even at a distance, and she puzzled over it for almost three hours before it sounded again and she placed it as children laughing.

This settlement...Alexandria. It's foreign to her. There aren't enough guards on the walls, the trees haven't been cut back on the perimeter so an attacking force could sneak up easily if it wished, the lawns inside are trimmed even though that's a waste of resources. She doesn't see anything substantial growing inside; no crops, no produce, no livestock. There are cars on the streets and men wearing polo shirts of all are loud and clean, and they smile with all their teeth on display like a threat.

Even the name doesn't fit well in her mouth. No matter how many times she tries to shape it. AL-EX-AH-N-DRE-AH.

Too many syllables. Excessive. A waste of noise.

A waste.

That thing in her collarbones trickles up in her throat, and her teeth clench again. High in the tree, hidden among the foliage, Maly waits and watches as each of the locusts goes in real. She sees them walk the streets as much as she can, until they drift out again, as clean as the people inside, tempted by the lure of what was.

'It is, she thinks, just like the signpost she saw on the railway. That bold painted lettering that offered sanctuary to all who came.

There is only what you build yourself.

As much as she acknowledges that, though, as much as she knows it to be fact, she cannot help but look upon the clean streets and big houses and feel something war with that squirming in her collar bones. Something that runs through chest and gut like a sad echoe of hunger.

There are reasons, she knows, against it. Various ones. _A list_.

But Maly feels.

The light glinting off the water inside the walls stings at her eyes, and she shifts, finally turning her head away. She has seen enough for today, knows the six-hour watch shifts and where the people go in with bags and come out with cans. She knows the building the guards go in with weapons and leave without them.

As she makes her way down the tree, she tries to deal with the squirming in the back of her mouth and the hunger that is not hunger. They fight and mix inside her, prickling along the inside of her throat, scratching it raw and forming a lump there. Inside those walls is something that isn't. Something not made to last. A deathtrap. A temptation. Something not real.

Meatsack, snuffling in the composting underbrush, perks at the soft sound of her feet hitting the ground. Its muzzle is coated with grime, short hairs clumped together with the remnants of its last meal. There is a hunger in its eyes as it makes its way over, tinged with wariness. It knows danger, and is dangerous itself.

This is what's real, she reminds herself as the cur carefully approaches. This nature, this risk.

Yet the ache persists, unbeholden to reason. It lingers like the shadows of the night in spite of the morning sun. Not logic reaches it.

She must show it. Show herself.

Maly inhales once, bending her knees as Meatsack comes ever closer. She makes herself small, open. Defeatable.

And Meatsack comes close, sharp teeth and grizzled maw, a thing that has attacked her again and again for openings less than this.

Her muscles tense, ready to fling the dog away once it takes the bait. A tightness runs through her, her body ready to defend itself from danger. From something real.

Its face inches close, and almost kindly, meatsack licks her cheek, its rancid breathe washing over her face, hotter still than the muggy day.

Something inside her shift, the lump magnifying and coalescing into a great mass in her lungs. She cant breathe. She cannot take this. It shouldn't be it should be it shouldn't-

Maly chokes, a gross hiccuping sound escaping her mouth without concern for her desires. Her lungs deflate, leaving her breathless, and her eyes sting in a way no blinking will clear. The world around her blurs into a mash of colors without lines, and a wetness slips across her cheeks, mixing with the dog saliva.

She chokes again, trying to draw air. It feels too thick, the lump inside her too solid. It hurts for no reason.

It should not be. People are dangerous, the settlement is riddled with danger, she was weak and open and Meatsack should have attacked. There is no room for this softness, for the place within those walls.

But Maly remembers this feeling, knows this shade.

Maly _wants_.

(She sobs.)

* * *

 **AN: So if you all are wondering why these chapters are coming later and later it's because I work a full-time job and then live on an organic farm as well, on top of trying to maintain social relationships and basic health. I still love writing, and no comment I can think of has made to much mention of the time passing, but I thought you all deserved an explanation. Thanks for hanging in here with me, and feel free to pass this fic along to friends. Writers live by word of mouth. Also low-key kinda want the original writer and artists to maybe peek at this one day. A long off dream, I am sure.**


	26. Hold my Hand

Sometimes in life, there are moments that shift the entirety of the way someone sees the world.

Rick has seen more than a few.

The earliest he remembers was when he was twelve and his grandmother died. The funeral is a blurry affair in his mind, white flowers and a hole in the ground in some park he can no longer recall. The suit he had been stuffed into had been stiff as a steel sheet, the fabric itchy and uncomfortable. For the first time in his life, he saw a grown man cry, his own father hunched over that grave like it was the only thing in the world supporting him. He remembers thinking of every storybook western he had seen, all those greaser flicks and fast-talking, gun-wielding men who never showed a hint of doubt. He remembers thinking that they were wrong and that men - _true men_ \- were no less for grieving. Not now, not ever.

The next was when he was in high school, drunk for the first time off of cheap Aristocrat Vodka a friend of a friend had nicked from the basement of some house, somewhere. It was a hot night, the sticky Georgia heat invading the house through the open window his cousin blew cigarette smoke out of, June bugs clinging to the screen. The first long pull from the bottle had burned, the cheap quality scorching his tongue and teeth, making him cough. The second was better, easier to get down as the people assembled goaded him on. His lips had tingled, his fingertips buzzed.

He remembers the world tipping, turning, and sliding away before it went black completely. He doesn't actually know what happened that night, and to be honest, he isn't sure he wants to. What he does know is that when he woke up, he was in a halfway familiar bed, stomach writhing, and Shane had been standing by his bedside with a bottle of water and a bucket read. His friends face, still rounded with teenage puppy fat, had an exhausted tinge to it, his eyes shadowed with the weariness that comes from watching over a drunk friend all night.

And when Rick had tilted over and emptied bile and acid into that feed bucket, he knew that Shane was not just a friend, he was a best friend. A brother.

There are more, more than he can rightly count. In recent years they seem to have accumulated at a faster rate than normal. His wedding day. His entrance into the force. The birth of his son.

After he was shot, they came faster.

The rising of the dead, Merle, finding his family, the first death, the CDC, the death of Shane, the prison, Andrea, Sophia, the governor, Terminus. The list goes on, a slew of moments that keep flying by faster and faster the older he gets. He's becoming better and better at recognizing them when they happen, can almost taste when they are about to come.

But this one… this one _blindsides_ him.

Before now Maly was indomitable. It wasn't that she couldn't be beaten or defeated. It's simply that Maly was as she ever was, a solid mountain jutting up from the earth in defiance of all the wind and rain that tried to make her bow. Maly was a force of nature, and nothing stopped her. She went the direction she chose to go, at her own pace, and nothing would budge her from her inflapple blankness; her sheer grit. Maly was a survivor, and he supposes he couldn't think of her of anything other than that. In his head she had always existed like she did when they found her, rugged and enduring.

But what he approaches in the forests isn't that.

Her shoulders are hunched by her ears, the thick collar of her leather jacket and the fabric of her scarf swallowing the bottom half of her face. Her thin arms are swimming her sleeves as they wrap around her torso, the very tips of her mud-caked fingers sunk deep into her ribcage. With her knees tucked to her chest, sitting in the grand expanse of nature, Maly looks… _small_.

Fingers grip his shoulder and he pauses. A glance over his shoulder tells him that Michonne can see what he sees. That she can feel something shifting too. That this is one of those moments.

Rick turns back to the woman in the clearing, the one the knows must have heard them coming.

"Maly?" he asks, voice whisper soft. He knows sound bothers her, that the noise of the community must grate. It's why he knows that she must have heard them coming.

There is a pause where the name sinks in and it seems to stretch even longer than usual. The humming of cicadas drones on in its rhythmic way, the birds twittering now and again. The bright sunlight filtering through the trees angles just enough to heat patches of his skin, causing fat drops of sweat to well up like dew before her head shifts to face him in the smallest increments, expression emptied.

Rick breathes deep through his nose.

Maly's hollowed, dirty cheeks have clean lines cutting through them, dried streaks exposing a clear mottled and ruddy complexion that comes from exertion. Her usually intense eyes are bloodshot and puffy, swollen slightly, looking for all the world like they have been rubbed a hundred times over.

"Oh, Maly," Michonne whispers.

She looks, Rick thinks, utterly human.

He takes a step forward, telegraphing his movements, and Maly watches with the dazed sort of dullness that he usually associates with heavy exhaustion. She doesn't move, though, doesn't try and stop his approach.

Instead, she makes a sound in the back of her throat. He sees the fabric of the scarf move, as if she is moving her mouth to form words and forgot to sync her voice.

Beside her, the merle coated canine perks its ears and huffs at her, head resting on its paws.

She coughs, thick and wet, and her eyes finally seem to fix on him.

"I ca…," she starts, but then trails off. Her eyes slide to the side, an attempt to remember the rest. Before now, the words she spoke were careful, meticulously enunciated. Not this. Not thin and unsure, voice distracted and rough. With sudden clarity, Rick realizes just how much effort it takes her to talk.

"It's not real in the walls," she finally manages, focusing again. "If you go in… it's not like out here. I can't go in. It's dangerous."

Rick sees it in her eyes then. Sees, because for once, what she is feeling writes itself on her face. The words don't make sense themselves, but the terror and longing make sense of them.

Internally, he feels an echo of the same. To survive in this world, you have to be strong. You have to have grit and fight for life.

Inside Alexandria, there is none of that.

He doesn't respond at first, regaining his mental footing at the unexpected shift, and doubting he has an answer in the first place. They came to tell Maly they had convinced Diana to let the dogs in, citing their use as an alarm system and defensive strategy in hopes that Maly would follow the pack in. But this is less straightforward, not cattle lead into a chute. This is complicated.

This is _human._

"It's there isn't it?" he asks, head lifting to look at her. "You can see it. Touch it. Smell it and hear it."

Maly's brows furrow, conflicted. Her tiny hands dig a little deeper in her coat, the skin stretched tight over the bones. She's so thin, so dangerously small.

"It is what it is, Maly, and we are what we are. If its dangerous or doesn't work, we keep going."

He gives a moment for the words to sink in, and almost to fast to catch he sees the flicker of her thoughts across her features. There's fear there, so much fear, but there is want as well, and something sad and ineffable besides.

Maly breathes one long draw in and lets it rush out. She unwraps her hands and twists to face them fully, taking in Michonne and the few others that came as well. Her eyes dart around, and he sees something warble in her. She can't seem to decide and is absolutely terrified of both prospects.

Wordlessly, Rick reaches out a hand to help her up.

The motion captures her attention, and for a second her whole body seems to still. There's an unsettling amount of focus she casts on his hand, and that fear melds into an unreadable sort of blankness. It is as if her being is stuck on the cusp of something, and Rick feels the whole world follow suit. This is it, that moment where everything changes.

Maly's eyes lift to meet his, and she takes it.

(Her hand trembles in his own.)


End file.
